Predatory journal checker
Predatory journal checker
Look up a journal and see whether our screening flags it, where that flag came from, and — more usefully — the positive signals that suggest a venue is legitimate. We also tell you plainly what this check cannot determine.
What this check actually does
We hold a screening flag for every venue in our journal index, drawn from two sources, and we show you which one fired. Neither is authoritative on its own, which is why we show the provenance rather than a single verdict.
More importantly, a page telling you a journal is 'not flagged' is close to worthless on its own. The signals that genuinely indicate a legitimate venue are positive ones — membership in DOAJ, Scopus, Web of Science or PubMed, a real citation record, a Scimago quartile — and every journal profile we publish shows those alongside the flag.
- Beall's archive: a well-known list of questionable publishers. It has not been updated since 2017, so it misses everything launched since and may include publishers that have improved.
- Name-pattern heuristic: our own inference, combining a suspicious title pattern with a negligible citation record and a low footprint in our library. This is a signal, not evidence.
- Positive signals we surface instead: DOAJ, Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, TR Dizin and SciELO membership, two-year citation rate, Scimago quartile, and publisher.
What this check cannot tell you
Read this section before you rely on the result. Our flag rate is low enough that you should assume false negatives are common.
- Only 1.6% of the venues we screen are flagged (278 of 17,538). Nobody credible thinks the true rate of problematic venues is that low — many simply are not in either of our sources.
- Beall's archive froze in 2017. A predatory journal founded since then will very likely pass our check.
- Roughly half our flags come from our own heuristic rather than an external listing, and a heuristic can be wrong in both directions.
- A flag is about the publisher or the name pattern, not about any individual article's quality.
- We cannot assess peer-review rigour, editorial-board legitimacy, or whether indexing claims on a journal's own site are truthful.
If a journal you are considering is flagged
Do not treat our flag as a verdict, and do not treat its absence as clearance. Either way, run the same independent checks — they take about ten minutes and are far more reliable than any single database.
- Search the journal in DOAJ — a listing there means it met a substantive set of open-access quality criteria.
- Work through the Think. Check. Submit. checklist, which is the standard the community actually uses.
- Check whether the publisher is a COPE member and whether the editorial board members are real, contactable researchers who acknowledge the role.
- Verify indexing claims at the source: search Scopus, Web of Science or PubMed directly rather than trusting a badge on the journal's own site.
- Look at a few published papers. Implausibly fast acceptance times and unedited English are the clearest practical warning signs.
Where the data comes from
The screening runs over the same venue index that powers our Journal Finder, rebuilt weekly from OpenAlex with quartile and SJR from Scimago and index membership from DOAJ, MEDLINE and TR Dizin. Nothing on this page is generated by a language model; it is a database lookup, so the same journal always returns the same answer.
Frequently asked questions
Related tools
- Journal Finder — get a ranked shortlist of venues for your paper, with flagged journals already excluded.
- What is a predatory journal? — the definition, the common warning signs, and how the term is contested.