Free resources
ThinkCheckSubmit.org is a non-profit website with a step-by-step guide to evaluating journal quality.17 The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a non-profit database containing a searchable list of high-quality, peer reviewed open access journals in all scholarly disciplines.25 The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) is a group of publishing organizations that agree to uphold certain standards ethical publishing practices. The COPE website provides a searchable database of reputable publishers and journals,21 guidance for authors and editors on addressing suspected misconduct,26 and example cases and advice for authors that have dealt with predatory publishers.27 SCImago Journal Rank is a free online database that provides measures of journal citation rates based on data in the Scopus database. Journals in SCImago can be sorted and filtered by subject, country, and open access status. Using SCImago can help you determine if a journal is actually indexed in a major citation database, and help you identify other high-quality journals in your subject area.28–30 For biomedical journals, you can check to see if a journal is in the National Library of Medicine (NLM) Catalog.19 If a journal’s entry in the NLM Catalog is listed as “Currently indexed for MEDLINE,” that means that all new articles published in this journal will appear in the citation database PubMed. If a journal is not in the NLM catalog or has an entry in the NLM Catalog but is not listed as indexed for MEDLINE, that may mean that it is either not considered a biomedical journal, or that it might not be considered a trustworthy journal. Stop Predatory Journals is a crowd-sourced project that provides lists of potentially predatory journals and publishers, journals with names intended to imitate those of legitimate journals, and potentially fake or misleading journal metrics systems.31 However, the administration is anonymous so the process for labeling predatory publishers lacks transparency. Subscription resources
Cabells International is a for-profit company that sells two subscription-based journal directories—Cabells’ Whitelist, which contains journals verified to provide igh-quality peer review and transparent business practices, and Cabells’ Blacklist, which contains journals with questionable or problematic business practices.32 Both lists contain in-depth explanations for each entry, an explanation of their methods, and ways for users and publishers to report errors or appeal mis-categorizations.33 Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is a journal analysis tool that is currently owned and maintained by Clarivate Analytics. JCR uses data from Web of Science, a subscription citation database also owned by Clarivate, to provide high-quality measures of journal impact metrics, including Journal Impact Factor (JIF).34 This tool can help authors verify citation metrics for potentially predatory journals and identify high-quality journals in their field.
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