Critical Links March 2018

Sandra Dunham

As an amateur skeptic, I have viewed the content of Facebook pages and Internet publications with a solid level of skepticism. I have scorned people who retweet or share obviously bogus news and attempted to do my own on-line research, to confirm or refute suspect claims. However, I now believe that in many cases I have been duped by information in what I believed to be reputable journals.

Quick quiz:

Which of the following is a reputable source of information?

• The American Research Journal of BioScience
• Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering & Sciences Publication
• Brainy Buzz
• The Center for Innovations in Business & Management Practice
• The International Academy of Business and Economics

Please keep reading for the answer.

Jeffrey Beall is a librarian and an associate Professor at the University of Colorado. Beall became concerned about the low quality of articles published in open access journals. An open access journal is a journal that is available to readers on-line at no cost. In other words, the journals that I typically use to research information. As a result, in 2010, Beall began to publish Beall’s List, a list of predatory publishers.

“Predatory publishers” are journals that charge scientists a fee to publish their research papers, and that do not peer review these articles prior to publication. Unfortunately, Beall removed his list in 2017 without explanation; which, has led to seemingly unsubstantiated rumors about the reasons for its removal. Thankfully, archived and cached copies still exist.

The is a Predatory Journals website is operated by an anonymous team of independent volunteers. Their goal is to “educate researchers and students, promote integrity, and build trust in scientific research and publications”.

Retired professor and former CFIC science chair Blythe Nilson confirms the need to confirm the legitimacy of journal articles before quoting them. She acknowledges that while it is relatively easy for a scientist to identify the journals that are legitimate in their field, this is much more difficult for a lay person. She offers the following suggestions for people questioning the legitimacy of a journal article:

1.      Check this list of predatory journals (and publishers)– if it’s there, its predatory

2.      Check a “white list” of reputable journals such as PubMed or Web of Science.

3.      Google the journal name with “scam” in your search engine and see what comes up.

Think, Check, Submit also offers the following red flags:

* Many journals all starting up at the same time with few to no issues out;

* Journals with titles indicating an excessively broad mandate (e.g. The International Journal of Business, Humanities and Technology)

* Inconsistent formatting of author names and/or titles; a suspicious number of spelling and/or grammatical errors;

* Mismatch between the location in the journal title and where the journal is based. Or journal titles indicating they are international but the entire editorial board is located in a single country;

* Promise of a suspiciously short turnaround time for papers submitted to its journals. A peer review typically takes many months.

Nilson adds to watch out for journals that charge to publish or promise to publish pretty much anything.

Back to our quiz. It was a bit of a trick question. All of these journals are listed on Beall’s list and believed to be predatory in nature. It seems that we need to do research on where we do our research if we want to accurately check facts. And CFIC strongly encourages fact checking to ensure that the skeptics don’t become part of the fake news problem.

[This article was first published in the March 2018 issue of Critical Links; additional information and links were updated in March 2025]