Predatory Journals: How to Spot One Before You Submit
No single list of predatory journals has existed since 2017. What exists instead is a short set of checks, DOAJ, Think. Check. Submit., a verifiable editorial board, disclosed fees and real indexing, that catches what a list never could.
An email arrives the same week a preprint goes up, addressed to the wrong department, congratulating you on your excellent article, and offering publication in fifteen days for a fee mentioned nowhere until the third paragraph. Nothing about the message is illegal. All of it is a pattern worth recognizing before you reply.
How to avoid predatory journals is less about knowing a list of bad actors, since no comprehensive one has existed since 2017, and more about running a short, repeatable screening pass on any journal you did not already know before it contacted you.
The wider journal submission process, from screening to the four decisions an editor can hand back, has its own guide, and it assumes throughout that the journal on the other end is a legitimate one. This piece stays one step earlier: confirming that before you submit anywhere.
What Happened to Beall's List
In 2008, Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado Denver, began compiling a personal list of publishers he deemed predatory. He screened for journals that bypassed real peer review and accepted almost anything so long as they received their processing fee. Beall's list expanded from 18 publishers in 2008 to 923 by December 2016. On a Sunday in mid-January 2017, it disappeared from his blog without notice or explanation.
Cabell's International's Lacey Earle said at the time, on social media, that Beall "was forced to shut down [the] blog due to threats and politics." Beall himself "declined to comment." A University of Colorado Denver spokesperson said Beall made a "personal decision" to take the site down and that the university "did not play a role in that decision." Nearly a decade later, neither of them has put the exact cause on the record.
What exists now, since nothing officially replaced that list, is a small set of different tools rather than one substitute. Cabells runs Predatory Reports, a paid database that held 20,274 flagged journals as of the end of January 2026, evaluated against more than 70 of Cabells' own criteria. DOAJ runs the opposite kind of list, a positive one: a journal being indexed there means DOAJ's own quality team already investigated it, logging more than 830 hours across over 470 investigations in 2024 alone, not just approving a submitted form. Think. Check. Submit. is a free checklist rather than either kind of list, and unofficial archived copies of Beall's original list still circulate, with no confirmation that any of them add genuinely new entries rather than just preserving the old ones.
How to Avoid Predatory Journals: Six Checks Before You Submit
Run these six checks on any journal you did not already know by reputation before it contacted you, or before you found it in a database search. None of them takes long individually, and skipping straight to submission is exactly what they exist to prevent.
- Is the journal listed in DOAJ, if it publishes open access? DOAJ requires at least two independent reviewers per article before a title is listed, and investigates every application rather than approving it automatically.
- Does Think. Check. Submit.'s checklist clear it? The checklist asks whether you or a colleague already know the journal, whether the publisher is easy to contact, and whether it states its peer review process without guaranteeing acceptance or an unusually short review time.
- Is the editorial board real and reachable? Search for two or three named members independently of the journal's own site, and confirm they list that editorial role themselves.
- Is the fee disclosed before you submit, not after acceptance? A legitimate journal states any article processing charge on its own website before you ever upload a file.
- Are the claimed indexing services real? A journal claiming Scopus or Web of Science coverage can be checked directly against each index's own public list of covered titles.
- Does the solicitation email read like a mass mailing? Generic praise for your work, a topic summarized without engaging its actual content, and a guaranteed fast acceptance are all signs it went to hundreds of other inboxes the same day.
None of these six checks need guessing, and none need trusting a single source blindly either, which is the point: a journal that is actually legitimate clears all six without friction, and a journal that resists even one of them, an editorial board you cannot verify, a fee that won't be named before you submit, is telling you something worth listening to.
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Warning Signs Versus What a Legitimate Journal Does
Six checks are a method. Reading a specific signal against what a legitimate journal actually does instead makes the same method faster to apply the next time an unfamiliar journal's name lands in your inbox.
| Warning sign | What a legitimate journal does instead |
|---|---|
| Guarantees acceptance or a review inside a few days | States its actual peer review process and typical timeline, without promising a result |
| Editorial board members you cannot find or contact outside the journal's own site | Names a board whose members are independently verifiable through their own institutional pages |
| Article processing charge appears only after acceptance | Discloses any fee, and any waiver policy, before you submit |
| Claims indexing in Scopus, Web of Science or PubMed that does not appear on that index's own site | Lists only the indexing that can be verified on the index's own public database |
| Solicitation email praises your work in generic terms and misreads the topic | Any contact is specific to your actual submission, not an unsolicited mass invitation |
Is the Journal Predatory, or Just Small and New?
A journal being new, small, or charging a fee at all is not itself a warning sign. Plenty of legitimate journals are two years old, publish four issues a year, and charge an article processing fee that funds real peer review and editing rather than a subscription model. Confusing smallness with fraud is exactly why a screening method beats a gut reaction: a small legitimate journal clears all six checks the same way a large one does.
The actual difference is whether a journal runs the editorial sequence it claims to run, not its size or its age. A legitimate journal, however new, still puts a submission through a real screening and review sequence before deciding. A predatory journal skips that sequence entirely, no matter how established its website makes it look, which is the thing you are actually checking for.
Clearing all six checks confirms a journal is legitimate. It does not confirm the journal is a good fit for this particular paper, which is a separate question with its own method. A journal finder that filters by scope, indexing and turnaround is the natural next step once predatory risk is off the table, matching the paper to a real journal rather than just ruling out a fake one.
If You Have Already Submitted, or Already Paid
None of this helps if the checks come too late, after a manuscript is already submitted or a fee already paid, and that is a common enough position to plan for rather than panic about.
- Request a formal written withdrawal of the manuscript, and keep every email in the exchange, since some journals refuse withdrawal requests or publish a paper anyway
- Treat an article processing charge as unlikely to be refunded once paid, since most predatory operations are built around that fee rather than around subscriptions or genuine reprints
- Check with your library or research office before paying a fee anywhere else, since some hold an institutional subscription to Cabells Predatory Reports and can check a specific journal directly
- Report the journal to DOAJ or Think. Check. Submit. if you have clear evidence, which helps the next author who receives the same email
With a legitimate target chosen, writing the abstract is the next task and is covered separately. Shortening one to a 250 word limit is a different skill again.
A paper withdrawn from a predatory venue is not a lost paper. It still deserves a legitimate journal found the same way any first choice should be, scope checked before anything else, and it still deserves prose that reads naturally to the real reviewers who will actually read it this time. Getting that prose right with an AI humanizer for academic writing is worth doing for a journal that is actually going to read the paper closely, which a predatory one never intended to do in the first place.
Frequently Asked Questions
How to avoid predatory journals comes down to running the same short checklist on any unfamiliar journal: whether it is listed in DOAJ if open access, whether Think. Check. Submit.'s checklist clears it, whether the editorial board is real and reachable, and whether every fee is disclosed before you submit rather than after acceptance.
Content planner and copywriter at TextPulse. Sara runs the blog day to day, from planning and drafting through to publishing. She writes the practical guides: clear explanations of academic writing problems, aimed at the person who actually has to hand something in.
