A professor and an old friend of mine called me a few months ago. He told me that he saw may papers in academic journals and asked me how much I had paid those journals to have my papers published. I explained that I had NEVER paid for publications. Then recently, two more professors asked me the same question. After conversations with them, I discovered that they were approached by predatory journals. Besides charging their contributors more than a thousand of dollars in fees, these journals’ greatest disservice to their authors is invisibility—that is, the papers that they may publish will be difficult to find. (There is a whole trend of open-access papers, books, and journals. They typically charge for publication, but they need to be offered by reputable publishers, so the quality of papers that appear on their pages would not raise doubt.)

But then how can you be sure that you are choosing a legitimate publisher? One way is to look at the reference section of your own paper; if you managed to find the articles that you cited, so do others. In fact, this is an important key to ensuring that your work will even be considered for publication: always cite at least one paper that was published in the journal to which you are submitting your work. If you did not cite any of the journal’s papers, then the editor may not consider you as a member of the community of his or her journal’s readers.