Thursday 10 July 2014

How can we avoid the risk of publishing in a fake journal / how can we evaluate a journal's quality?

Impact Factor (IF) is one of the journal quality measures, but beside arguing about this measure, it is not easy for researchers to find the correct IF of any journal. One may say that we should depend on the IF calculation produced by Thomson Reuters. However, there is an issue here: it is not easy to find their report! And another issue: it is not easy to find the IF of a specific journal in their report (e.g., see attached file). On the other hand, some journals write their IF on their website, but don't declare where they got this IF. 
There are some sites that calculate journal IFs such as:
http://www.citefactor.org/impact-factor-list-2012.html
http://globalimpactfactor.com/
http://www.jifactor.com/ 

But I think that what's most risky here is publishing in a fake journal. For example, this website http://fakejournalss.wordpress.com/list-of-fake-computer-science-journals/
has a list of fake journals, but are they really fake?
Is there any way to know the true quality of journals and to avoid fake ones?

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