How to Tell a Trustworthy Journal
Recently, someone in an intercollegiate Facebook group asked how to tell if a journal were legitimate. I responded, and was surprised by the number of people who found it helpful (or, at least, helpful enough to Like). This post is an expanded version of that answer, in the hope that it could be helpful to even more people if it found its way outside Facebook’s walled garden.
We’ll cover two scenarios: journals and papers. We’ll assume, given that I’m a mathematician and this is a pretty mathy blog, that we’re working in the field of pure mathematics. Let’s start with journals. Say you’re a mathematical librarian, and a professor has asked you to subscribe to a particular journal, or you are a researcher, and you want to know to whom to submit your papers. Your task, modulo some budgeting and logistics, is mostly to make a judgment on the trustworthiness of this particular publication.
Before we can ask how to do that, we should consider what a journal is. It’s a group of academics, with access to funding and a printing press. Take away everything you can get by holding up a newspaper office, and a journal is a group of academics. Therefore, we judge a journal in the same way we judge any other group of academics: we find people whom we trust who will vouch for them.
With this in mind, your first stops should be blacklists and whitelists. Search online for the name of the journal plus “predatory” or “scam”. There are websites such as Beall’s List which keep records of some of the worst offenders. At the same time, there are lists of publications that you should probably trust more. Check large academic libraries: if they subscribe to a journal, it’s likely that their librarians have gone through this process to some extent. Ask mathematicians where they submitted their papers. If you recognize the journal name from a citation in the references section for a paper that you liked, that’s a good sign. Then there are the lists that most good journals should be on. The Australian Mathematical Society has a ranking of many mathematical journals. Even something that they grade as C might be OK, but if you can’t find your publication anywhere that might be a red flag. The same goes for MathSciNet. All of this is just about finding other academics who have gone on record, in one way or another, as saying that this journal is legitimate.
If you’re still not sure, look at how the journal describes itself. There are the standard things to watch out for: it should charge either a subscription fee or a submission fee, but not both; it should list its editorial board; it should claim to be peer-reviewed. Check out the editors: are they, themselves, legitimate? Do they have advanced degrees? Are they practicing academics? Do they mention on their CVs that they are editors for this journal? Look at the publisher. Do they publish other journals that you recognize? You have now moved from looking for trusted third parties to asking if you can trust the journal directly.
Papers are both trickier and easier. They’re trickier because, even if they’re published in a journal that passes all these tests, they can still be wrong. If they’re preprints, you don’t even have that. They’re easier because, for mathematicians at least, everything you need is right in front of you. The best way to determine if you should trust a paper is to go through with pen and paper and duplicate every step of the logic. If you don’t have time for that – and nobody has time for that – then, once again, you’re back to looking for references. Check out the authors. Have they published anything else? Are they practicing academics? Do they work at accredited institutions? Skim the references. Do they indicate genuine knowledge of the domain, or are they mostly broader reference works? Neither answer is bad per se, but depending on the context you might hope for one or the other. Always remember that these sorts of hints are nothing more, and that even the best make mistakes. If you want something done right, you really sometimes do have no other option but to do it all over again yourself.