CHM 7010 - Turning Research into a Thesis: Source Evaluation/Metrics

A predatory publisher is a publisher who produces low quality academic journals.  These journals are rarely peer-reviewed, and often charge the author a publication fee.  The publisher works hard to dupe authors into publishing by emulating well-known publishers, lying about their credentials, and soliciting submissions with spam emails.  Learn how to evaluate and identify predatory publishers using the criteria below:

• Little or no peer review
• Fake ISSN
• Editors with no or fake credentials
• No editors listed at all
• False indexing claims in Web of Science, Directory of Open Access Journals, etc.
• Rapid acceptance (within 2 weeks)
• Call for papers email, a pre-acceptance email, and other "scammy" email
• Empty or dead links
• Spelling and grammar errors
• Fake Impact Factor
  • Impact Factor can only be assigned by one company, Clarivate Analytics (formerly Thomson Reuters and Institute for Scientific Information).  An easy way to check is by searching the Impact Factor in InCites Journal Citations Report.

Google can be a great place to start your search for free information. Google Scholar helps you find scholarly information that may or may not be free. Wright State University Libraries pays for you to have access to many of the fee-based articles that you find in Google Scholar.

Whether using Google or Google Scholar, be sure to evaluate what you find.