Assessing questionable journals.

An increasingly fun part of my job is assessing journals for their reputability.  Here’s a quick report I did for a cow-orker recently, asking about the rather interesting “International Journal of Social Science and Business” ijssb.com.

Thanks Sara,

That was very entertaining.  Here’s a list of things that make me think this is a less than reputable journal.

From the initial website (ijssb.com)

• Can’t spell “author”
• Anti “Plagiartsm” (sic) graphic
• Call for papers is much more prominent than promoting the current edition
• 45 Laburnum Grove doesn’t look like much of an office.

• The ISSN doesn’t show up in a search
• They don’t even pretend to be indexed by anyone, so I assume they just aren’t.  I can’t be bothered looking them up at this point.
• They don’t pretend to have memberships of the standard OA publisher’s associations (OASP/COPE…)

In short, avoid.

Thank you for putting that my way!

Anton