Before using that article for a journal club or sending off your manuscript to an unknown journal, it's a good idea to evaluate the journal's credentials.
While the growth of online publications have contributed to the ease and speed of publishing study findings, it has also increased the number of publishers who do not follow scholarly best practices or worse, are predatory in their practices.
Below we've listed some library resources that you can use to evaluate the journal before you cite that article, present at that journal club, or publish an article.
Tool to evaluate and compare Science and Social Science journals using citation data from scholarly journals, technical journals, and conference proceedings. Use the Journal Citation Report (JCR) to look up citation metrics for scientific journals, including journal impact factor, quartile, and rank.
**IMPORTANT NOTE: When looking up a journal, check that the title and ISSN match the journal as listed. One common device that predatory publishers use is to create titles that are extremely similar to well-known, respected journals with only a slight variation.**
Use the following resources along with the journal's website to determine how the journal is viewed within the discipline and what to expect when you publish with the journal. Do they charge a fee for article publication? Will the article be open access or embargoed for a time period first? Some of the following resources can help.