How to spot a predatory journal before you submit
A predatory journal publishes for a fee without genuinely running peer review. The loss is not only the money: the paper sits on your record, never appears in a serious index, and cannot be taken back. Ten minutes before submitting buys what no amount of effort afterwards can.
First rule: never verify a claim on the claimant’s website
Almost every predatory journal site says “indexed in Scopus” or “listed in Web of Science”. That sentence is not evidence. The evidence is finding the journal in the index’s own search. The same goes for the ISSN: a number printed on the site proves nothing, so look it up at the ISSN portal (portal.issn.org). This one habit eliminates most of the list at the first step.
Watch when the fee appears
Open-access journals charging a publication fee is normal. What is not normal is when the fee surfaces. A journal that states its charge before submission and one that attaches an invoice to the acceptance letter are running different businesses.
Treat a promised review timeline as a warning
“Peer review in 48 hours” or “published within a week” advertises the absence of a process, not its speed. Real peer review is unpredictable because it depends on finding reviewers. A journal promising a deadline is politely telling you it skips the step.
So what does “no journal quartile” mean?
Pofolia matches journal quartiles (Q1–Q4) and SJR from Scimago data, joined by the journal’s ISSN. If a card shows no quartile, it means the journal was not found in Scimago’s list — it does not mean the journal is bad. We stress the difference because misreading it is unfair to legitimate work:
- Newly founded legitimate journals have no quartile yet; entering an index takes years.
- Many respected regional and national journals never appear in Scopus-derived rankings at all. Absence is not a verdict.
- But when a journal presents itself as international and high-impact and cannot be found in any index, that contradiction is a real warning.
Stop waiting for one authoritative list
There is no free, current, single-source list that settles the question. Using three tools together is the present best practice: Think. Check. Submit. for a pre-submission checklist, DOAJ as a positive screen for open-access journals, and COPE membership for publishing ethics. None of them clears a journal on its own, but a journal absent from all three has told you enough.
We covered what the quality signals measure and what they do not in a separate post; the limits of quartile and SJR are there.