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Scholarly Publishing: Where to Publish

What are Predatory Publishers and Journals?

A predatory publisher is an opportunistic publishing venue that exploits the academic need to publish but offers little reward for those using their services.

The academic "publish or perish" scenario combined with the relative ease of website creation has inadvertently created a market ripe for the exploitation of academic authors. Some of these publishers are predatory on purpose, while others may just be making mistakes due to neglect, mismanagement, or inexperience. While the motivations and methods vary they have common characteristics:

  • Their primary goal is to make money.
  • They do not care about the quality of the work published.
  • They make false claims or promises.
  • They engage in unethical business practices.
  • They fail to follow accepted standards or best practices of scholarly publishing.

How to Avoid Predators

How to Avoid Predatory Journals -- A Five-Point Plan by Jocalyn Clark. The BMJ (January 19, 2015)

Be iNFORMEd 
Checklist designed to help researchers determine whether or not to publish in a journal. Created by the Duke University Medical Center Library & Archives.

Think. Check. Submit.
A guide to help researchers identify trusted journals. This guide was created with support from several well-known publishing groups.

Where to Publish

First -- talk with the CORE Librarian, who can help you if you have any questions.

Start with JANE -- Journal/Author Name Estimator (JANE)  JANE matches your title, abstract, or keywords to millions of documents in MEDLINE to help determine the best journals in which to publish your research.

MEDLINE   Because you are working in a medical field, it is helpful to know that journals included in MEDLINE, accessible from the PubMed search platform, must meet a number of standards in order to be indexed. There are other subsets of PubMed, such as PMC, a free archive of biomedical literature which  includes some journals included for MEDLINE. Although many PMC journals are credible, being “indexed for MEDLINE” is consistently an indicator of journal quality.  In order to check journal indexing status, visit the NLM catalog: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nlmcatalog/journals For more information: https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/dif_med_pub.html.

PsycINFO covers the professional and academic literature in psychology and related disciplines including medicine, psychiatry, nursing, sociology, education, pharmacology, physiology, linguistics, and other areas. Inclusion of a journal title in PsycINFO generally indicates high quality. For journal title list, see: http://www.apa.org/pubs/databases/psycinfo/coverage.aspx.

 

Evaluating Open Access Titles and Publishers