Double-check the bibliography for predatory publishers and journals

Features
1

In order to ensure that no articles from predatory journals or publishers are cited (or part of my literature), I want to compare the well-known predatory journals and publishers with my bibliography.

For this, I implemented a python-based application, which does exactly that, please see description/code/screenshots here: https://github.com/CfKu/check-bib-for-predatory.

Of course, it would be much more convenient, if it worked directly in JabRef.

2

Thanks for the tool, I think it could maybe be implemented as part of the integrity check and would be helpful for a lot of people.

I would suggest you open a Feature request at our github repostory. Or if you like, you could direclty implement it in JabRef :wink:

Regards

3

Thanks for your respond.

Apparently, on GitHub I get this message: “Please use the GitHub issue tracker only for bug reports and suggestions for improvements.
Feature requests, questions and general feedback is now handled at http://discourse.jabref.org.
Thanks!”
Who is right now?

Regards

4

@CfKu Both :wink:

Github is for Bug reports and also concrete enhancements. In this case GitHub is more suited, because you can crosslink to your repo and there is already an implementation we could reuse.

Forum is more a place for discussing idea.

5

Filed at https://github.com/koppor/jabref/issues/348.

6

Thanks ;), was about to add it there.

1 Like
7

I recently became aware of possible legal consequences. E.g., listed at Jeffrey Beall - Wikipedia. Some other background at GitHub - stop-predatory-journals/stop-predatory-journals.github.io: A listing of predatory academic journals and publishers..

Not sure if we should keep that feature. It also does not work great as there are many false positives: Integrate check-bib-for-predatory · Issue #348 · koppor/jabref · GitHub

Maybe, we should just offer the user to maintain a list of allowed and denied publishers?

2 Likes
8

Maybe a good starting point is also to use whitelists, for example by adding SCI/e as whitelisted journals.
But these information are not accessible publicly, right?
However, then you also have to maintain the list of “proper” journals and might get threatened to include certain journals or whatever… Thus, I’m not sure if this is a good idea either.

9

For journal abbreviations, we offer public lists (https://abbrv.jabref.org/) - and the possibility that users customize their own list: Journal abbreviations - JabRef.

Maybe, we should remove the shipment of any build-in list and just offer the framework to import (maybe maintain) lists.

1 Like
10

Hello,

As mentioned in this discussion, it seems that the well-known pre-print server arXiv is considered predatory.

I like the idea of a built-in list (for well known scams) however:

  1. it would be nice to be able to tune it the list (add or remove entries)
  2. I think that arXiv (and other well known pre-print servers) should not be part of the built-in list. People using articles from such sources are aware of the “risks”.
11

Due to the many false positives, we removed the feature in the latest dev version.
We will try to come up with a better idea of importing and editing custom lists