If you are a researcher, your inbox already knows this problem. Flattering emails arrive week after week: "Dear esteemed scholar, we cordially invite you to submit your valuable manuscript to our prestigious journal." Some of those invitations are genuine. Many are not. They come from predatory journals, and responding to the wrong one can cost you money, time, and credibility. The good news is that these journals are usually easy to recognise once you know what to look for. This guide lists 12 warning signs, gives you a checklist that tests any journal in about ten minutes, and explains what to do if you have already submitted. For the positive side of the process, see our step-by-step guide on how to publish a research paper in a legitimate peer-reviewed journal.
A predatory journal is a publication that exists mainly to collect fees from authors. It claims to run peer review, editing, and long-term archiving, but in practice it provides little or none of these. Manuscripts are accepted almost automatically once payment is made, articles appear online with minimal checking, and the "journal" may disappear when the operators move on to a new title.
The harm is real. You lose the fee — sometimes several hundred dollars or more. Your name becomes attached to a venue that universities and promotion committees increasingly discount, which can damage rather than build your record. Worst of all, once your paper appears on such a site, most legitimate journals will treat it as already published, so the work cannot simply be submitted elsewhere.
No single sign proves a journal is predatory, and new legitimate journals can look rough around the edges. But when several of these appear together, the safest decision is to walk away.
The journal found you, not the other way round. Messages are flattering but generic, praise work you never published in their field, and invite papers on almost any topic, often with an urgent deadline such as "submit within three days for our special issue." Legitimate journals announce calls for papers, but they do not chase individual authors with personalised flattery.
The homepage displays impressive-sounding numbers from organisations you have never heard of — "Global Impact Factor", "Universal Impact Factor", and similar invented labels — or it uses the name of a real metric misleadingly. A genuine Journal Impact Factor comes only from Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports; anything else should be verified at its source before you believe it.
You cannot find the publication charge anywhere on the website, or the charges page is vague about amounts, currency, and what the fee covers. Transparent journals state their article processing charge (APC) plainly, before submission, so that authors can budget and seek institutional support.
There is no editorial board page, or it lists only first names, or the "editors" have no institutional affiliations. In some cases real scholars are listed without their knowledge. Check a few names: if their own university pages never mention the journal, treat the board as decoration, not leadership.
"Peer review in 48 hours." "Guaranteed publication in 7 days." Real peer review depends on independent experts reading your manuscript, and no honest editor can promise their verdict on a timetable. Speed guarantees mean the review is skipped, faked, or meaningless — and a guaranteed acceptance is a product being sold, not a judgement being made.
Spelling and grammar errors, broken links, mismatched journal names on different pages, and stock photographs of campuses the publisher has no connection to. Careful journals are produced by careful people; a publisher that does not proofread its own homepage will not proofread your article.
Nothing is said about plagiarism screening, authorship criteria, conflicts of interest, research ethics approval, or what happens when misconduct is alleged. Legitimate publishers write these policies down and follow recognised guidance such as that of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Silence on ethics is itself information.
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists open access journals that meet basic quality and transparency criteria. A journal that says it is open access but cannot be found there deserves harder questions. Directories are not perfect and new journals take time to be listed, but absence combined with other warning signs is a strong signal.
The journal displays no ISSN at all, displays one that belongs to a different title, or claims an ISSN that cannot be verified. Every legitimate serial has an ISSN registered for that exact title, and you can check it free of charge in the ISSN Portal. A mismatched ISSN means the journal is borrowing someone else's identity.
One "journal" happily covers medicine, mechanical engineering, literature, law, and agriculture — sometimes in a single issue. Real journals have a defined scholarly community and a focused scope. A scope that accepts everything exists for one reason: to make every recipient of the spam email a potential paying customer.
Different from vague fee pages, this is the ambush: you submit in good faith, receive a rapid "acceptance", and only then discover the charge — sometimes with surprise extras for "fast-track processing", page counts, or colour figures. A legitimate journal never lets the first mention of money arrive after the decision.
Mistakes happen even in good journals, and honest publishers explain how corrections, expressions of concern, and retractions are handled. Predatory journals say nothing about removing or correcting content, because post-publication responsibility costs effort they never intend to spend. Your name stays attached to whatever appears, permanently.
Before you submit anywhere, run these checks. They take about ten minutes and will stop almost every bad outcome above:
These checks overlap with the wider question of fit: a journal can be legitimate yet wrong for your paper. Our guide on how to choose the right journal for your research paper walks through the scope, audience, and article-type checks to run alongside the safety checks above.
First, do not pay any invoice that arrives, and do not pay a second one to "withdraw" your paper. Then email the journal formally withdrawing your manuscript, keep copies and screenshots of everything, and check whether you signed any copyright transfer or licensing agreement — your rights differ depending on that answer. If the paper has not been published and you did not transfer copyright, you can normally document the withdrawal and submit the work to a legitimate journal instead; explain the history honestly in your cover letter. If the paper has already appeared, ask in writing for its removal and seek help from your institution's library or research office, which deals with these cases regularly. Do not be embarrassed: these operations are designed to deceive busy researchers, and acting quickly protects your work and your colleagues.
The simplest summary of this guide is that trustworthy publishers put everything in writing before you submit: the peer review model, the charges, the licensing terms, and the ethics rules. At Global Academic Publishers, those commitments are published openly on our policies page — covering open access and licensing, publication ethics, peer review, and charges — so that any author can check us against the same standards this article recommends, before sending us anything. We invite exactly that scrutiny, and you can browse our titles on the journals page.
The first twelve signs catch most predatory journals, but operators keep changing their tactics. The following signs are less obvious, and they are particularly useful when a journal's website looks polished at first glance. As before, one sign on its own is not proof. A pattern of several signs is what should stop a submission.
The journal claims to be indexed in well-known databases, but a search of those databases finds no trace of it, or the claim is worded in a way that sounds impressive without actually saying anything. Watch for phrases such as "indexed in leading international databases" with no database named, or for logos of databases placed on the homepage without a verifiable listing. Indexing is a factual claim, so it can be checked: search the database itself, using the exact journal title and ISSN, rather than trusting a logo. A journal may also be listed in a general search engine or a repository and describe that as "indexing" in a way that implies a selective bibliographic database. Those are different things, and the distinction matters for how your work will be found and assessed.
Some predatory operations copy the title, or a near-identical version of the title, of a real journal, and build a clone website around it. Others choose a name that differs from a respected journal by one word, hoping that a busy author will not notice. Always compare the website address, the publisher name, the ISSN, and the editorial board with the version of the journal you already know. If you arrived at the site through an email link, search for the journal independently instead of trusting that link. A legitimate journal's official site is usually linked from the publisher's own catalogue, from a university or society page, or from a directory entry that you can cross-check.
A serious journal explains where its content is preserved if the publisher stops operating. That may be a recognised digital archive, a national library deposit arrangement, or another preservation service named on the site. Predatory journals rarely mention archiving at all, because their business model does not include keeping articles available for the long term. If the site says nothing about preservation, ask what happens to your article in five or ten years. Silence on this question is a practical risk, not a technical detail: an article that vanishes from the web is difficult for future readers, examiners, and promotion committees to verify.
The "About us" page gives no physical address, no registered publisher name, and no way to contact anyone except a generic web form or a free email account. Legitimate publishers, including small and new ones, can usually be traced: they name an organisation, give a contact address, and show a consistent identity across their journals, their policies, and their domain registration. A publisher that cannot be identified cannot be held to its promises about peer review, corrections, or refunds. If you cannot work out who is behind the journal, do not hand them your manuscript or your money.
"Submit today and publication fees are waived." "Only three slots remain in this issue." "Pay now to secure fast-track review." These are sales tactics, not editorial processes. A genuine editorial decision cannot be discounted, rushed, or reserved like a hotel room, and a journal that uses countdown language is treating your manuscript as inventory. Be especially cautious with offers that arrive shortly after a rejection elsewhere, or that promise to publish a paper that a legitimate journal has already declined without any revision. The offer is flattering precisely because it removes the hard part of publishing — independent scrutiny — and that removal is the problem.
Read more than the homepage. Open several full articles and look at their formatting, referencing, language, and methods. Predatory journals often publish work that is far outside the stated scope, badly formatted, missing references, or written in a way that suggests no editor or reviewer ever read it closely. A single weak article does not condemn a journal, since quality varies everywhere, but a whole issue of unedited, off-topic, or incoherent work tells you what review, if any, actually happened. Pay attention to whether articles have received dates, revision dates, and acceptance dates: a pattern of same-day submission and acceptance across many articles is itself evidence.
This overlaps with the broad-scope warning above, but it is worth checking in the archive rather than only in the aims statement. A journal may describe a narrow field on its aims page and then publish unrelated papers anyway, because every accepted paper brings a fee. Browse the last two or three issues: do the titles belong together, do the authors work in related fields, and does the journal appear to have a readership that would actually read these papers? If the archive reads like a random collection of unrelated submissions, the journal is not serving a scholarly community. It is serving a payment queue.
Legitimate journals explain what happens if you disagree with a decision, if you discover an error after publication, or if you want to raise a concern about another article. They name an editor or an ethics contact for such matters. Predatory journals offer no appeals process, no complaints route, and no named person responsible for editorial decisions. That matters before submission as well as after it: if something goes wrong, you will have nobody to contact and no process to invoke. A journal that will not explain how it handles disputes is telling you, in advance, that disputes will not be handled.
Most researchers first meet a predatory journal through an email, so it is worth slowing down and reading that email critically. A genuine invitation is normally specific: it names the journal, explains why your work fits its scope, and comes from an identifiable editor at an identifiable institution. A predatory invitation is usually generic. It praises your "outstanding contribution" without naming a paper, a finding, or a field. It invites work on almost any topic, even though the journal claims a specialist scope. It sets an unusually short deadline, offers a fee waiver or discount for immediate submission, and signs off with a vague title such as "Managing Editor" and no institutional affiliation you can verify.
Other details repay a second look. Check the sender's address, not just the displayed name: a free email account, or a domain that does not match the journal's website, is a warning sign. Check whether the journal's name in the email matches the name on the website it links to. Check whether the email mentions peer review, charges, and licensing at all; predatory invitations often mention none of these until after you reply. None of this means you should never respond to an unsolicited invitation — legitimate journals do send calls for papers — but it does mean the email itself is never evidence of quality. Treat every invitation as a lead to be verified, using the checks in this guide, before you send anything.
Not every journal that fails a quick check is predatory. New journals may not yet be listed in DOAJ, may not yet have a long archive, and may have a small editorial board. University and society journals in some fields may also have modest websites. The question is not whether a journal looks established, but whether it is transparent and accountable. A legitimate new journal will usually answer direct questions clearly: who edits it, who publishes it, how peer review works, what it charges and when, what licence applies, and where articles are archived. If those answers arrive promptly, in writing, and match what the website says, that is reassuring even when a directory listing is still pending.
By contrast, evasive or contradictory answers are informative. If the journal cannot name its editors, cannot explain its review process, changes its fee after you ask, or pressures you to submit before you have had time to check, treat those responses as additional warning signs. You can also ask a librarian or a senior colleague to look at the journal with you; research libraries deal with these questions regularly and can often spot a problem quickly. Our guide on double-blind peer review explained describes what a genuine review process involves, which makes it easier to judge whether a journal's description of its own process is plausible. Similarly, our explanation of APC waivers explained helps you distinguish a genuine waiver policy from a discount used as a sales tactic.
A practical rule is to keep a short written record of the checks you ran: the date, the directory results, the ISSN result, the fee stated on the website, and any email replies from the journal. That record costs a few minutes and protects you later if anyone asks why you chose a particular venue. It also makes it much easier to compare journals side by side when you are deciding where to submit. If, after the checks, you still feel unsure, the safest choice is to submit elsewhere. There are many legitimate journals in most fields, and the cost of waiting for a better venue is far smaller than the cost of publishing in the wrong one.
The original advice in this guide — do not pay further invoices, withdraw in writing, and keep copies — remains the starting point. The steps below expand it into a staged plan, because what you should do depends on how far the process has gone.
Stage 1: Submitted but not yet published, and no fee paid. Send a short, formal withdrawal email to the journal's editorial contact, stating the manuscript title, the date of submission, and that you withdraw the manuscript with immediate effect and do not authorise its publication. Keep a copy of the email and any automated reply. Do not enter into a negotiation about a "withdrawal fee": a legitimate journal does not charge authors to withdraw an unpublished manuscript, and paying such a fee rewards the practice. If the journal does not reply, send the message again after a reasonable interval and keep both copies. Once the withdrawal is documented, discuss the next submission with your co-authors and, if relevant, your supervisor, so that everyone agrees on the record.
Stage 2: A fee has been paid, or a copyright form has been signed. Read exactly what you signed before taking the next step. A copyright transfer and an open access licence are different documents with different consequences, and the wording matters more than the title of the form. If you transferred copyright, you may need advice before submitting elsewhere, because the new journal will ask you to confirm that the work is not already published and that you hold the rights to publish it. Your institution's library, research office, or legal adviser can help you interpret the document and draft a request for the rights to be returned. Keep every invoice, receipt, email, and screenshot, including the version of the journal's website and fee page as it appeared when you submitted, since those pages can change.
Stage 3: The article has already appeared online. Write to the journal requesting removal, stating clearly that you withdraw your consent to publication and asking for written confirmation. At the same time, tell your co-authors and your institution what has happened, so that nobody is surprised later. Most legitimate journals will not accept a paper that has already been published elsewhere, so do not simply resubmit the same manuscript without advice: that could create a duplicate publication problem on top of the original one. Instead, ask your institution or a trusted senior colleague how to handle the record. In some cases the honest course is to leave the article where it is, explain the circumstances if asked, and build your subsequent record in legitimate venues. That is a difficult outcome, but it is better than compounding the problem with a second submission that breaches another journal's rules.
A short withdrawal message can follow this pattern, adapted to your situation: "Dear Editor, I am writing to withdraw the manuscript titled [title], submitted on [date] by [authors]. I withdraw this manuscript with immediate effect and do not authorise its publication in any form. Please confirm this withdrawal in writing. I have not authorised any fee or copyright transfer beyond [state what, if anything, was signed]. Yours sincerely, [name, affiliation]." Keep the tone factual and polite. You do not need to accuse the journal of anything in the withdrawal itself; your aim is a clear, dated, written record that the manuscript was withdrawn.
Predatory publishing rarely affects only one person. A paper usually has co-authors, and a supervisor's name on a questionable venue can affect students as well as the supervisor. Before submitting, share the journal checks with every co-author and agree on the venue together, rather than letting one author choose it alone. If you supervise students, build the ten-minute check into your normal supervision: ask students to show you the DOAJ result, the ISSN result, and the fee page before they submit, and discuss the result with them rather than simply approving it. That habit protects students who are under pressure to publish quickly and may not yet know how these operations work. If a problem is discovered after submission, inform co-authors promptly and honestly. Colleagues are generally understanding when they learn about a mistake from the author, and far less understanding when they learn about it from a committee or an examiner. Our guide on reasons research papers are rejected is also useful here: a rejection from a legitimate journal is a normal part of research, and it is never a reason to turn to a venue that will accept anything.
The most reliable protection against predatory journals is to choose your venue before you are under deadline pressure. Start with journals you already read and cite, journals recommended by your supervisor or colleagues, and journals published by learned societies and university presses in your field. Check each candidate against the directory, ISSN, board, and fee checks in this guide, and note the results. A shortlist of three or four legitimate journals, ranked by fit rather than by speed, gives you a plan if the first choice declines your paper — which happens to experienced researchers as well as to beginners. That plan removes the temptation to accept the first flattering invitation that arrives after a rejection. For a fuller discussion of fit, audience, and article type, see our guide on how to choose the right journal, and for what open access publication should involve, see open access publishing explained. Choosing slowly, in advance, is not wasted time. It is the habit that keeps a research record credible over a whole career.
| Signal | Legitimate journal | Predatory journal |
|---|---|---|
| Peer review | Real review taking weeks | Acceptance within days, no review |
| Editorial board | Named experts you can verify | Fake names or people listed without consent |
| Indexing | Verifiable listings | Fake badges and false claims |
| APC transparency | Fee stated before submission | Hidden fees after acceptance |
| Contact details | Real address and working email | Only a web form, no address |
| ISSN and DOI | Valid ISSN and Crossref DOIs | Fake or missing identifiers |
These authoritative external resources explain the standards and tools mentioned in this guide:
What is a predatory journal?
A predatory journal is a publication that charges authors fees while providing little or none of the peer review, editing, and archiving it promises. Its real product is the fee, not the scholarship.
How can I quickly check whether a journal is legitimate?
Search for the journal in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), verify its ISSN in the ISSN Portal, read its editorial board and ethics policies, and work through the Think. Check. Submit. checklist. The checks in this guide take about ten minutes.
Does charging an APC mean a journal is predatory?
No. Many respected open access journals charge an article processing charge. The warning sign is not the fee itself but hidden fees, invoices that appear only after acceptance, and charges that buy a guaranteed decision.
Is a promise of very fast peer review always a red flag?
Usually, yes. Genuine peer review depends on busy external experts and cannot honestly be guaranteed in 48 hours. Legitimate journals may offer fast first decisions, but they do not guarantee acceptance on a timetable.
I already submitted to a predatory journal. What should I do?
Do not pay any further invoices. Write to the journal formally withdrawing your manuscript, keep copies of all correspondence, and check whether you signed a copyright transfer. If the paper has not been published and rights were not transferred, you can normally submit it elsewhere once the withdrawal is documented. Your institution's library or research office can help.
What is a hijacked journal?
A hijacked journal is a fake website that copies the title, and sometimes the identity, of a real journal in order to collect submissions and fees. Always verify the website address, publisher, ISSN, and editorial board independently, rather than trusting a link in an email.
If a journal is not listed in DOAJ, is it automatically predatory?
No. New journals take time to be listed, and some legitimate journals are not open access and therefore would not appear in DOAJ at all. Absence from DOAJ is a reason to check harder — especially the ISSN, the editorial board, the fees, and the review policy — not a verdict on its own.
Should I pay a fee to withdraw my paper from a predatory journal?
No. Do not pay a withdrawal fee, and do not pay a second invoice to "release" your manuscript. Withdraw in writing, keep copies of everything, and seek advice from your institution's library or research office if the journal refuses to confirm the withdrawal.
Can a fast review ever be legitimate?
Some legitimate journals do reach a first decision quickly, particularly for short articles or when reviewers respond promptly. The warning sign is not speed alone but a guaranteed timetable, a guaranteed acceptance, or a pattern of same-day submission and acceptance across many articles. A genuine process can be fast; it cannot be promised in advance.
What should I do if a colleague or supervisor suggests a journal I suspect is predatory?
Check the journal yourself using the steps in this guide, and share what you find factually and politely — the DOAJ result, the ISSN result, or the fee page, for example. Many researchers have simply never been shown these checks, and a clear, evidence-based note is usually welcomed. The final decision about where your name appears should be one you can defend.
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