Publishing

• ISSN Portal – Search for authoritative publication records by ISSN to verify journal legitimacy.
• PubPeer.com - Reference this post-publication peer review site where researchers call out suspicious papers before they’re officially investigated.

Retraction - A retraction is a formal notice that a published article is withdrawn from the scholarly record due to errors, ethical violations like plagiarism or misconduct, or other breaches of research integrity. Retractions aim to correct the literature and maintain academic standards.

Retractions are not inherently a bad thing for journals. Journals with clear, consistent retraction policies often show strong editorial integrity. However, the frequency, handling, and visibility of retractions can tell you a lot about a publisher’s practices.

Predatory Publishing - Predatory journals or publishers exploit academics’ need to publish without providing the editorial and peer review services typically associated with legitimate publications. They often aggressively solicit submissions, charge authors high fees, publish work without meaningful review, and obscure their location, staff, or affiliations. These publishers may also falsely claim indexing or impact factors, fake reviewer credentials, and generally mislead authors.

Think of predatory publishers as scammers in scholarly clothing. They profit from academic publishing while providing no real research contribution.

Paper Mills - Paper mills are unethical, for-profit businesses that charge for the chance to publish or sometimes entirely fabricate their manuscripts. These operations can involve forged data, fake peer reviews, or ghostwritten articles and they are a serious threat to research integrity. Like predatory publishers, paper mills aggressively solicit new submissions from researchers or propose “repurposing” previously released results.

Paper mills are like factories for fake research — mass-producing uncreditable or fabricated papers for high sums of money at an incredible pace.

• Self-citation - artificially inflating citation metrics by excessively citing your own work later on. This leads to distorted h-index scores and is a violation of publishing ethics. 

• Citation stacking - journals excessively and unwarrantedly cite one another across multiple outlets to to boost their Impact Factor (IF). They are often suppressed when this is discovered.