This question keeps reappearing on RG in various forms (Is journal X legit? What would be a legit journal in which I can publish Y?). This puzzles me because it indicates that there are authors who do not know the journals of their field.

If you wrote an article and look for a a place to publish it, you answered a research question, i.e. you constructed the state of the art, identified an unsolved problem, applied methods to solve that problem, and formulated an answer. You did all this in interaction with the scientific literature, i.e. with publications that appeared in journals. The natural place to publish would be these journals, or other journals in which the people that are important to your own work publish.

What I am trying to say here is that as researchers, we work in a specific field, and researchers in this field communicate through a set of journals. With a publication, you want to be part of that communication, so you try to publish in these journals. From this perspective, it doesn't matter whether a journal is phony or obscure - your article won't be read if appears in either of them.

So look at the journals you read articles from. Look at the journals your supervisors publish in. Look at the journals in which people that are important to your work publish. If you look for the journals in which the important communication of your field happens, you ar eon the safe side because to my knowledge, no predtaory journal has become an important communication channel of a scientific community.

Of course, these journals are difficult to get into to varying degrees. However, not all of them are SCI journals (I still occasionally publish in non-SCI-journals myself), and there are usually enough journals to choose from. The first experiences are usually harsh but you have supervisors to help you through your first experiences, and the begin of a publishing career is always a bit of trial and error applied to the writing, to the selection of journals, to reponses to reviews and so on. There is no way around that because the purpose of writing an article is to communicate one's findings, and this means publishing in a journal that is read by your colleagues.

If you get invited to publish articles, the invitation comes from a journal that is not an important communication channel because it does not get enough submissions. Other indicators are the absence of editorial boards, editors you have never heard of as authors or at conferences from your field, promises made (speedy publication, open access, "indexing with google scholar" and suchlike).

This is my viewpoint, feel free to drop yours:

Nowadays, the World has over 50k scientific journals and these fall in the realm of two dominant databases namely Clarivate and Scopus. Clarivate (formerly ISI) indexes approx. 21k journals, while Scopus includes about 36k journals. Some journals belong to both databases/lists. All in all, Clarivate is widely agreed to be more rigorous and picky than Scopus, which oftentimes accepts low quality or predatory journals (those hop on and off Scopus often made the list and can be easily checked on Scimagojr).

So, how predatory journals make it to Scopus?

Let's see how Scopus' criteria to enlist a journal (see https://www.readyforscopus.com/)

1. The journal has a min of 2-year publication history

2. Journal has a unique title, not identical to one we already index in Scopus

3. the journal is peer-reviewed

4. Abstracts, titles and keywords are in English; authors-in Roman script

5. References are presented roman Script

6. Journal is published regularly and per publishing schedule, which available at journal's website

7. Ethics and malpractice statement is available in English at journal's website

7.1 Editor and Editorial Board (must be recognizable and clearly mentioned)

7.2 All following aspects of Authors and their responsibilities are covered at journal's website

7.3 All following aspects of peer-review process are covered clearly

7.4 Listed below Publication ethics aspects are presented at journal's website

7.5 Copyright and licensing information is clearly described on the journal's web site

7.6 Subscription fees or pay-per-view fees are clearly stated on the journal's website

7.7 A journal's plan for electronic backup and preservation of access to the journal content in the event a journal is no longer published (access to archive)

7.8 Information about the ownership and/or management of a journal is clearly indicated on the journal's website.

8. Journal has ISSN and/or e-ISSN/ISSN-L confirmed by international ISSN Center

9. Jorunal has dedicated website in English (alone or in addition to website in local language)

10. Author instructions (guide for authors) are available in English at journal's website

11. Aims and Scope are available in English and presented at journal's website

12. Geographical diversity (Editors and Authors are from different territories)

13. Journal's documents are cited by Scopus sources

14. Journal's Editors are experts in subject area, covered by the journal

15. Journal has DOI

16. Content quality

Unfortunately, Scopus does not require a specific affiliation of the journal, which means everybody can open a journal, there is no need to have any scientific committee or association backing its birth.

Nonetheless, predatory journals can take advantage of the unspoken rule forcing authors to cite their current publications to enrich their citations to Scopus' standard. For that reason, newborn journals 2-3 years of age happen to be of equal rank to 50-year journals can easily be expected. Needless to say, it's quite easy for a predatory journal to make it to the Scopus list.

Of the Scimagojr quartile arrangement (extract from Scopus), these low-quality or predatory journals usually rest at the bottom (i.e. Q3 or Q4), however, it's worth noting that some climb to Q2 or even Q1 just 2-3 years after they were founded. This is why Scopus eliminate about 600 journals annually from its list and of course index several hundred new ones. The highly fluctuated number of annual journals makes Scopus less prestigious in the eye of the scientific community.

Ok, so how to identify a legit journal, I offer some thoughts:

1. A scientific journal should be backed by orthodox and recognized associations in its field (e.g. prestigious scientific institutions, universities) or academic publishers (e.g. Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Taylor&Francis, Sage, Emerald, Oxford...)

2. Science should not be for-profit or taking financial perk as its foci, makes no mistake to associate Open-Access (OA) with for-profit, it's not true. However, it's true that all predatory journals aim for your pocket only. Make sure the journal you are aiming at qualify criterion 1, then you are 90% good to go.

What if a journal qualifies for criterion 1 but is not indexed in Scopus or Clarivate? As long as the experts in your narrowed field recognize and endorse it. Indexing in reputable Clarivate databases is just a matter of time.

This question keeps reappearing on RG in various forms (Is journal X legit? What would be a legit journal in which I can publish Y?). This puzzles me because it indicates that there are authors who do not know the journals of their field.

If you wrote an article and look for a a place to publish it, you answered a research question, i.e. you constructed the state of the art, identified an unsolved problem, applied methods to solve that problem, and formulated an answer. You did all this in interaction with the scientific literature, i.e. with publications that appeared in journals. The natural place to publish would be these journals, or other journals in which the people that are important to your own work publish.

What I am trying to say here is that as researchers, we work in a specific field, and researchers in this field communicate through a set of journals. With a publication, you want to be part of that communication, so you try to publish in these journals. From this perspective, it doesn't matter whether a journal is phony or obscure - your article won't be read if appears in either of them.

So look at the journals you read articles from. Look at the journals your supervisors publish in. Look at the journals in which people that are important to your work publish. If you look for the journals in which the important communication of your field happens, you ar eon the safe side because to my knowledge, no predtaory journal has become an important communication channel of a scientific community.

Of course, these journals are difficult to get into to varying degrees. However, not all of them are SCI journals (I still occasionally publish in non-SCI-journals myself), and there are usually enough journals to choose from. The first experiences are usually harsh but you have supervisors to help you through your first experiences, and the begin of a publishing career is always a bit of trial and error applied to the writing, to the selection of journals, to reponses to reviews and so on. There is no way around that because the purpose of writing an article is to communicate one's findings, and this means publishing in a journal that is read by your colleagues.

If you get invited to publish articles, the invitation comes from a journal that is not an important communication channel because it does not get enough submissions. Other indicators are the absence of editorial boards, editors you have never heard of as authors or at conferences from your field, promises made (speedy publication, open access, "indexing with google scholar" and suchlike).

Huy Dang As you mentioned Scopus has a large database of more than 36k journals so it is difficult to keep evaluating indexed journals correctly. Scopus claims that all indexed journals are peer reviewed, while some of the indexed journals are in Beall's list and even they are not peer reviewed. It seems that Scopus database is not trustable.

Huy Dang, thank you for bringing the question.

Jochen Glaser, I agree with you and have a recent experience with one of these "invitations" to publish. I received two e-mails from the same journal but under the names of two different researchers. I checked their names out on Google and found out that they are very respected in their areas, very experienced.

I decided to look for their personal e-mails and sent messages to confirm they belonged to the journal's editorial board, as it was written on the journal website. Both of them told me they had nothing to do with the journal.

Could that scam be bigger than this? It is unbelievable.