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Recognizing Predatory Journals and Conferences

A guide to educate JWU faculty, students and staff about journals and conferences that employ deceptive practices for unmerited financial or reputational gain. Originally created by Pieta Eklund, and reproduced / edited with permission

Glossary

Some Relevant Terms & Concepts

APC - Article Processing Charge: the fee authors pay to publish articles with articles open access.

​Hijacked journals: Legitimate journals whose website and/or brand has been taken over or copied by a predatory journal.

Impact Factor: A bibliometric indicator trademarked by Clarivate Analytics.It is calculated based on the average number of citations of articles published in the two preceding years. Read more under Impact Factor in the menu.

Database Indexing: Indexing of journals in subject-specific databases such as ERIC, or citation databases like Web of Science and Scopus get better dissemination among scholars and researchers than do journals that can only be surfaced through a Web browser such as Google

Misleading and fake metrics: Shady bibliometric indicators. A predatory journal might use Google Scholar (rather than a real citation database that does quality control on included journals) to calculate their ranking, or neglect to share any information on how said ranking is calculated. Some fake metrics use the term "impact factor" even though this is trademarked by Clarivate Analytics.

Open Journal System (OJS): A platform for open access publishing. It is designed to make it easy and convenient to publish open access content, and is used by many journals published by universities.