An essential 5 point checklist before publishing your next research article

In today’s academia research publication is done for two purposes, either for career advancement or growing one’s reputation as an expert in a field. Govt of India have mandated that research publications are necessary to get a PhD, getting an appointment as a faculty in college and universities or for promotion after getting a job as a part of career advancement scheme. As publications are necessary part of academia, many cunning activities are happening in the Indian publishing industry (Read this blog post to know how the journal publishing industry works). In recent times many such news came up where researchers, scholars and professors of reputed institutions have been fallen to the trap of fake publishing. Subhra Priyadarshini  have reported in Nature Asia about India leading the race of article submission in predatory (fake) journals, Indian Express reported about how a Hyderabad based company were looting academia by publishing 177 fake journals.

This type of incidents has not only happened in India, but happened in other countries of the world too. That’s why OECD countries, European Research Foundation has their specific mandate regarding publication. Publication in this type of journals not only degrades the reputation of a researchers, but also it is a waste of time and hard work as those type of publications are of no use for career advancement or recruitment.

So here is a checklist of 5 simple points which you can do before publishing your next article in a journal-

1. Before submission of your article, search the name of the journal in Beall’s list of predatory journal .   Beall’s list is a list, that finds out the predatory (Fake) journals and their publishers name. If your choice journal name appears in the list, avoid publishing in that journal or any journal from the publisher of the journal
2. After step one, if the name is not in Beall’s list, then search the name of the journal in UGC approved journal list , Scopus indexed journal list and Web of Science indexed journal list. If your choice journal name appears in any of these list, then you can publish in the journal. Don’t forget to match the ISSN no of the journal too. If your journal name also doesn’t appear in any of these list, then permanently drop the plan to publish in that journal.
3. Beware of false Impact Factor and Indexing claim. There are only two world accepted journal indexing platform (which are also part of Times Higher Education ranking, NIRF ranking etc.) viz- Web of Science and Scopus. Don’t go for any other indexing claim. Also remember that Impact Factor is a registered entity of Web of Science and can be assigned only by Web of Science. Other platform’s Impact Factors can be regarded as fake. It is to be remembered that indexing platforms like Web of Science, Scopus have team of experts that studies a journal’s performance and then only adds them to their list. Google Scholar indexes everything from good to bad without any review and Google Scholar indexing is not counted of academic performance.
4. You don’t always need to pay for publishing in peer reviewed journal. Good journals give the author an option to make the article Open access so that the article remains free to be accessed and downloaded and the author retains the copyright in such scenarios. Pay the Article Processing Charge only when point no 2 is true for the journal.
5. Peer review is an essential part and it is a time consuming process. Good journals where article submission rate is high, peer review takes time approximately from one month to some time a year too. So avoid publishing is such journals which claims to do peer review in weeks.