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Predatory Publishing

Guide to the basics of predatory publishers and how to avoid them.

Allowed Lists

"Allowed list" is the name given to a list of organized journals that meet the criteria to be considered professional and genuine (Strinzel et al., 2019).  Their works are peer-reviewed and professional in nature.  In some cases, they are also called "whitelists."  You can view some allowed lists for free online.  The following "allowed lists" were retrieved from Elmore and Weston (2020).

  • Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE): It contains a database of scholarly journals.
  • Directory of Open Access Journals (DOA): This is a free directory that indexes the highest quality, peer reviewed, and open access journals.  It contains over 12,000 journals and covers several academic disciplines (Murphy, 2019).
  • SCImago Journal Rank: A free database that contains journals from the information in the Scopus (an abstracting and citation) database.  It also has international journal rankings by country.

Blocked Lists

"Blocked list" is the name given to an organized list of predatory journals (Strinzel et al., 2019).  They are sometimes called "blacklists" as well.  There are several free blocked lists, including:

 

  • Beall's List is a comprehensive list of predatory journals.  The original website was previously taken down, but scholars recreated the list and is currently maintained by anonymous authors (Murphy, 2019).

If you are interested in using Cabell's, you can view our database tutorial below.