Tool flags suspicious journals before researchers submit papers

Deciding where to publish just got a bit easier. An online tool that tracks publishing patterns in academic journals could warn researchers about potentially problematic journals before they submit their work to them, says the tool’s developer. The platform, called Journal Trends, was released last month by its developer, Achal Agrawal, a data scientist and research-integrity sleuth based in India. The growing number of journals makes it increasingly difficult for researchers to assess which publications are trustworthy, says research-integrity sleuth René Aquarius, a neurosurgery researcher at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Agrawal says he used to spend hours manually scanning journals for signs that they were publishing a glut of low-quality studies. A common red flag is a sudden surge in the number of papers a journal publishes, particularly from authors in a single country, Agrawal says. This suggests that the journal is prioritizing publishing lots of papers without conducting proper peer review, he says. But spotting such patterns required painstaking analysis of publication data, journal by journal, says Agrawal, the founder of India Research Watch, an online group of researchers and students who highlight integrity issues.

So he built Journal Trends. The tool allows users to input a journal’s unique identification number and get a breakdown of published papers by country and year, he says. The tool will also be useful for research-integrity investigators trying to determine whether suspicious papers reflect broader systemic issues in a journal, Aquarius says. The data behind the tool come from OpenAlex, an open-source index that catalogues hundreds of millions of scientific documents, providing an alternative to commercial databases such as Scopus, which is owned by Dutch publishing company Elsevier.

Journal Trends also integrates data from the Problematic Paper Screener (PPS), a tool created by Guillaume Cabanac, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse in France, and his colleagues, which scans millions of research papers every week for indicators of potential misconduct. Agrawal’s tools can now generate shareable visualizations highlighting spikes in papers flagged by the PPS or unusual publication trends. For example, data visualized through Journal Trends show that the International Journal of Advances in Signal and Image Sciences, which is published by XLE Science in India, published only 19 papers in 2024. But in 2025, publications jumped to 153, with 53% including an author in India.

Sudden publication surges alone do not prove a journal is untrustworthy, says Agrawal, but might indicate that researchers should investigate a journal further before submitting their work or paying article-processing charges. The journal was delisted from Scopus in 2025, meaning that it no longer appears in lists of trusted publications and is no longer counted for certain citation metrics. However, on its website, the journal continues to advertise its Scopus indexing. It charges up to US$1,200 to process articles, and, as of 28 May, it had published 465 papers this year.

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