If you want to eliminate the risk of publishing in an untrustworthy journal, it is indispensable that you perform these three steps:
- Check objectively verifiable formal criteria of transparency principles and ethics of scholarly publishing. This step includes checking 10 criteria which are described in detail in the following sections. We recommend recording the resulting number of points for each criterion on an evaluation chart.
- Perform a content analysis of the journal, i.e. read a couple of the journal’s volumes and, based on your own expert knowledge or with the help of check lists (see section 2.2), evaluate the professional quality of the published articles.
- Search on the internet. There are various websites where scholars share experience with publishing. In this way you can gain insight into the quality of the respective journal’s editorial work (see section 2.3). As a part of this evaluation step you should also familiarize yourself with how the databases Web of Science, JCR, and Scopus evaluate the journal.
The following sections describe the individual, above-mentioned steps of the approach for a detailed evaluation of a journal.