Video Transcript: "Is it Really Peer Reviewed?" by Michelle Nolan
You’ve probably found journal articles through Google Scholar before, but are they really peer reviewed? How can you tell?
Peer review is a series of quality tests performed by editors and other researchers in a field prior to accepting a publication in a scholarly journal.However, there’s a problem in the scholarly publishing world right now with what we call predatory publishers.
Predatory journals deceive authors and readers by claiming they have a peer review system when they do not. So you might be reading something that you think is peer reviewed only to find out it has never been reviewed at all.These essentially fraudulent journals trick researchers into submitting their work and paying large sums of money in publication fees. But it’s just a scam.
So why am I mentioning Google Scholar? Unlike some of the subscription databases your Libraries offer which vet journals for legitimacy, these fraudulent journals show up in Google Scholar all the time. And aesthetically, they can look pretty convincing.
Take for example this predatory journal that I get emails from almost every semester. At a glance, it’s very convincing. To an untrained eye, it’s easy to get tricked into thinking this is an actual peer review journal.If I open up one of the articles in it, the saddest thing is that this is probably legitimate research that the authors were tricked into submitting to this predatory journal instead of a real one.So while this really looks really looks like it’s a peer reviewed article, this has not been peer reviewed.
I see students and professors get fooled by this all the time. So, how can you actually check if the article that you’re reading is legitimately peer reviewed? I’m going to give you a couple of tools that you can use.
The first tool that I really like is the UlrichsWeb Global Serials Directory. This directory presents information on different publications, including when the publication started, whether they have a verified peer review system, how often issues are published, and more.
You can search by title in Ulrich’s, but be aware that some predatory journals purposefully choose titles that are very similar to legitimate journals in order to fool you even more.
An unambiguous way to search is to look for a journal’s ISSN number. I’m going to pull that and copy and paste it over. An ISSN number is just like an ISBN number on the back of a book. It’s a number assigned to a publication.
When I search for this ISSN number, you can see by looking for this black and white striped referee shirt (which is not in this column) that this is not a peer review journal.
The reason why they use a referee shirt is because in some fields, peer review is called “refereeing.”
In contrast, if I search for a legitimate journal: this is the ISSN number for the Journal of the American Chemical Society. You’ll see in that column there is the black and white referee shirt which shows that the Journal of the American Chemical Society is indeed peer reviewed.If I open up the entry for the journal, you can find more data about this publication that Ulrich’s has collected.
Now, Ulrich’s isn’t always perfect, especially for new journals that just started. But it’s a good starting indicator to get an idea of what you are looking at. Everyone at the University of Florida has access to Ulrichs. If you’re watching from another institution, check with your librarians about what tools are available to you.
Open access journals are free for the public to read and do not require institutional subscriptions. Since most predatory journals claim to be open access journals, another great tool to check is the Directory of Open Access Journals, or DOAJ. This is a free website that everyone has access to. The DOAJ is a curated list of legitimate, open access, peer review journals. They have strict vetting requirements to get a journal listed. You can search for a journal title in DOAJ to see if they are included in the list.
So once again, if I search for this ISSN number from the [predatory] journal that I had seen before, it does not come up. So this predatory journal is not listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals.
Okay, if you’ve made it this far in this video, here is my all time favorite story related to predatory publishing. In 2005, computer scientists David Mazières and Eddie Kohler responded to an email solicitation from the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology. Which is a predatory journal.
And this is the manuscript they submitted. The authors were thrilled to learn that this article had been “peer reviewed” and was deemed “excellent research.” Now of course, this manuscript had never been peer reviewed at all. But just look at it. This thing is a work of art.
Something this egregious you would, of course, recognize as not a scholarly research article. But many predatory publications are quite convincing. So always, if you feel an inkling of skepticism about the quality of the source you’re reading, do more searching around until you are satisfied.
I’m Michelle Nolan, Chemical Sciences Librarian at the Marston Science Library, University of Florida. Happy searching.
