How can a questionable journal be identified: Frameworks and checklists

Questionable journals represent an increasing problem in the scholarly communication. The warnings against questionable journals are plentiful but how do we reliably identify the questionable journals? The aim of the present article is to present an overview of the existing frameworks for identifying questionable journals. Most of the frameworks rely on describing the journals under investigation according to a set of criteria and some can even be turned into a metric or mechanism. The development of frameworks for identifying questionable journals has so far been characterised by a great diversity in format, length, and content. Generally, the frameworks come with little information on development, validation, and reliability. The consequences of the prolific tool development are discussed.

Predatory journals, deceptive journals, counterfeit journals, fake publishers, questionable journals, checklists, evaluation frameworks, quality assessment