“Predatory” and “Pseudoscientific” aren’t the same thing. Elsevier journals for example are long-established and highly scientific, but also highly predatory. Arxiv only does pre-prints, but isn’t predatory at all.
this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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A few points worth clarifying:
As another user pointed out, pseudoscientific journals and predatory journals aren't the same. As you pointed out, pseudoscientific journals are generally easy to identify because they have a very clearly stated agenda typically. This means they will publish anything that places their ideas in a favorable light and are generally not objective. They tend to push garbage "science".
Predatory journals are journals and publishing firms that have what is effectively a pay-to-play scheme, where authors are enticed with minimal peer review at relatively high publishing cost. Meaning, any crappy study can/will be published so long as the authors pay the publication cost. There's a list online (Beall's List) of what might be considered predatory.
Now, I will also point out that the authors paying is not what makes this unethical and damaging to science. The vast majority (if not all) scientific publishing is contingent on the authors paying the publication cost and these costs are going to be especially high in open access journals (e.g. PLoS, which is not predatory). These costs are only incurred when the journal agrees to publish after getting positive recommendations from reviewers. Predatory journals forgo the review, and simply publish.
Fraudulent work (i.e., faked data) is likely to be present in any reputable journal, albeit at low frequencies. I say "low" because science is increasingly moving toward an open data model of publication where the raw data sets associated with study must be available publicly, including code used to produce results. While there aren't loads of people reanalyzing published datasets, the possibility that someone might could be enough to deter most people from making shit up.
I wouldn't let the Wakefield example spoil the wealth of good studies that's been published at the Lancet. At this point the only people giving that study any credence are Brain-worms and his ilk. A better bet is to look for retractions issued by the journals. This typically happens in the event of fraud, non reproducibility, fundamental flaws in the study, etc.
Source: I'm an academic scientist and actively publishing.
Tldr: look at Beall's list for predatory journals; don't worry too much about fraud in reputable journals; look for retractions if you're really worried.
I want to fill in on the fact that any journal can end up publishing garbage science if someone is able to dupe the reviewers. This means that no matter what journal you're reading, you need to read science critically. Sensational claims require sensational evidence, and ideally any work should be 100% reproducible based on the information given in the article.
Depending on the field, you can also often get a good indicator by investigating the authors of the article (checking out the last author first is a good tip). This mostly applies to very recent research where looking at citations is a poor indicator of quality, but where research is often dominated by a few reputable research groups around the world.
For older research, looking at how often the article has been cited, by whom, and why, can give you a very good indicator of the quality of the research. Solid research is often built upon later, while garbage is often refuted and then abandoned.
Of course, none of the above is infallible, but if you read critically to ensure the research makes sense, find that it originates from a reputable group, and see that others have based newer research on it, it's probably trustworthy. After a while you start building up an impression of the most important names and journals in the field, but that requires reading quite a few articles and noticing which names and journals repeatedly show up.
Hasn't Beal's list been taken down quite a while ago? I remember making a copy of it before they removed it. It was a great source, but sometimes it needed some context. I think all of Frontiers in ended up on the list for reasons, but their review process was mostly alright, for example. It was this kind of lack of clearly definedrules and explanations that let them to taking the list down. Is it back up?
Impact factors?
The best have usually been around a longer time and have a reputation. Which ones do the pros cite?
If you happen to live near a university, try asking their library staff. They are often well versed in this kind of questions, and some libraries even offer consultations.