It can be almost impossible for most people to tell which articles in their search results come from predatory or questionable publishers. These articles have all the trappings of "legitimate" publications, yet the research they describe could be poorly done, copied from other papers, or even completely fraudulent. With just a little effort, it is possible to tell the difference and avoid bad research papers.
Results from predatory journals are included in Google searches—even when using Google Scholar. The screenshot below shows a Google Scholar search in which the first or most "relevant" scholarly article is, in fact, totally fraudulent and based on the television series Breaking Bad.
Your first line of defense is to use the research databases from the library’s A-Z database list. These databases are curated by the creators/publishers. That means that all of the journals included have been evaluated for the quality of research they publish. By using these databases you can be sure that the papers have really been peer reviewed and meet basic standards for research integrity.
The main drawback of this approach is that you limit yourself to a subset of published research—only those journals that were approved by the databases.
Sometimes you need to use papers you find using Google Scholar or other non-curated search tools. In this case you will need to evaluate the papers before you decide whether or not to use them. The following step-by-step evaluation process is just one possible way to do this.
If your article was published in an OA journal not listed in DOAJ, you may still be able to use it, but it will take a bit more work to evaluate it.
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