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For authors

Due to the growing number of papers published by ITMO University authors in journals of questionable scientific value, we would like to remind you to carefully choose journals you submit papers to.

For authors of scientific papers

Due to the increasing importance of publication activity metrics, many organizations offering questionable publication services have appeared on the market. These publishers mislead potential authors by promising a quick and easy way to publish their research results.

As a rule, these companies promise to prove their scientific value by indexing papers via Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) and Bibliothecal-Bibliographical Classification (BBC), as well as by publishing ISBN materials in the Russian Science Citation Index database.

Please note that these features have nothing to do with expert evaluation of papers and do not confirm the scientific value of a journal.

‣⁌ More information

UDC and BBC are bibliographic library classification systems.

International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a numeric identifier that can be purchased for any book.

Russian Science Citation Index does not provide any evaluation of papers. Unlike Web of Science or Scopus, it simply collects all publications by Russian authors. In order to submit a paper to the Russian Science Citation Index database, a signed contract and a paper that follows minimal formal requirements is enough.

No evaluation of the papers' quality takes place.

What to avoid

We would like to remind you that thanks to modern technologies and databases (including the Russian Science Citation Index), all of your publications will always remain a part of your research career and some might hurt your reputation.

Authors should avoid interaction with:

Correspondence conferences that publish papers in conference proceedings or eponymous journals and claim to be international and scientific may not actually be any of those things.

There is a large number of such organizations. Here are some examples:

What is a bad sign?

You receive invitations to participate in a conference too often, even though you haven’t cooperated with a given organization, haven’t participated in its events, and aren’t aware how they have acquired your email.
The conference is organized by a consulting firm instead of a scientific organization (such as a university or a research center).
The topic of the conference is overly vague or general, something like Science: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.
No information on the organizing committee is available.
No information on the process of evaluation and selection of papers is available.
No information about the percentage of previously accepted papers is available. This may mean that there is no evaluation and selection at all.
It’s a correspondence conference.
The organizers ask participants to pay for being published, not for participation.

The more of these “symptoms” apply to an event, the more questionable it is.

Fake Science Conferences List

Fraud Meeting Announcements

Ways to spot a predatory journal (based on materials from the website of Adyghe State University’s Scientific Library)

The journal publishes papers in two or more scientific fields that aren’t topically or methodologically related to each other.
The name of the journal doesn’t correspond to the field of studies or location of its editors and authors. For example, if the editorial committee of the European Journal of Scientific Research is located in Pakistan or mostly publishes articles by researchers from India and China, or the Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences publishes papers in the fields of electronics and physics.
Abnormally high number of previously published papers.
Published papers don’t include contact info of their authors.
There is no information on the paper review process.
The journal describes itself as popular science, applied science, or analytical journal.
The journal’s target audience as stated in its website includes people who aren’t professional researchers and scientists.
The journal’s website or printed editions contain misleading information about being indexed by Web of Science and Scopus. This can be checked on the websites of Thomson Reuters and Elsevier.
Abstracts, keywords, and information about the authors of all papers in Russian (for Russian journals) and in English are not available on the journal’s website.
The journal asks authors to send reviews along with papers.
The time period between receiving a paper and making a decision to publish it is too short and is not enough for a review (two-three weeks or less).
The journal doesn’t share info on their publisher, editorial committee, or the chief editor; the editorial committee consists of less than five people, or it’s not clear where they work, and so on.
The journal or the publisher try to attract researchers to become a part of their editorial committee via spam mailing.
The journal offers authors to pay in order to be published out of turn.
The journal is not indexed by the Russian Science Citation Index (for Russian journals) and Web of Science or Scopus (for international journals).
The journal doesn’t have an ISSN.

Hundreds of open access journals accept fake science paper

Predatory publishers: the journals that churn out fake science
Who's Afraid of Peer Review?
Is Open Access the same as Predatory Publishing?

Predatory publishing is when fraudsters create a website for a faux-journal and use design, pictures, and information on the editing committee taken from websites of real journals. Then, they offer to publish your paper for a payment. Once the payment is received, the paper is either published in the given questionable journal or the website is taken offline.

The Rise of Junk Science

A Peek Inside the Strange World of Fake Academia

Offers to publish a paper in journals approved by the Higher Attestation Commission urgently aren’t trustworthy. Please note that you can’t publish a paper in a reliable journal in one day.
For example, this journal says “Publish your article in our journal in just one click!”

Mediation services for translation, formatting, and editing of papers are not illegal. Each author has a right to decide whether to use them or not. However, we would like to remind you that not all mediators are trustworthy and you should always double-check their reliability. Otherwise, your paper might appear in a journal that has nothing to do with your publisher of choice.

Scopus recommendations on how to check a journal before submitting a paper

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