A study based on in-depth interviews with 23 health and science journalists finds that most believed predatory journals are a problem for their peers, or a problem in theory, but not a problem they would ever fall for themselves.
More importantly, while having limited awareness and understanding of these journals, many felt confident that they could avoid predatory journals by applying strategies such as relying heavily on a journal’s reputation, prestige and familiarity, according to the study “‘I’d Like to Think I’d Be Able to Spot One’: How Journalists Navigate Predatory Journals,” published this month in Journalism Practice.
This reliance on a journal’s reputation and prestige has implications from a source diversity perspective, increasing the likelihood that research from newer, lesser-known journals — such as regional journals, open-access journals, and those published in the Global South — will remain hidden from public view, the authors write.
“To me, a first really core takeaway is taking one moment out of this hectic life that is being a journalist, sit back and reflect on who you might be excluding in whatever your practices are for selecting research to report,“ says Alice Fleerackers, one of the authors of the study, and an assistant professor of journalism and civic engagement at the University of Amsterdam.
The study, based on the interviews with journalists in North America and Europe, adds to the limited literature on journalists’ use of academic research, emphasizing the need for greater awareness of predatory journals.
Predatory journals are publications that claim to be legitimate but prioritize profit over scholarly integrity. Their number has been on the rise, with at least 15,500 identified in 2022, according to some estimates.
These journals often sidestep editorial practices that are associated with legitimate journals, such as peer review and quality control. They may have fake names on their editorial boards or list people who are not aware that they are listed as members. Some may hijack the names of legitimate journals.
It’s important for journalists to be aware of predatory journals, which can provide a platform for untrustworthy science, fueling misinformation and eroding public trust and confidence in science. Journalists may unwittingly report on low-quality or even highly flawed studies published in these venues, says Fleerackers, who is also a research associate at the Scholarly Communications Lab at Simon Fraser University.
But researchers agree that shoddy journals can harm the integrity and quality of scholarly work.
More about the study and its findings
In in-depth interviews with 23 journalists in Canada, Denmark, England, Mexico, Switzerland and the U.S., Fleerackers and her co-authors explore how journalists perceive predatory journals; how they ensure the publications they use are credible and trustworthy; and the implications of their perceptions and practices on the diversity of the research that makes the news.
Researchers recruited the participants through international professional organizations and social media groups for science journalists and communicators, including the Public Communication of Science and Technology Network’s listserv and Binders Full of Science Writers Facebook Group. They conducted the interviews via Zoom and de-identified them for analysis.
Most of the journalists were based in the U.S., were freelancers, and had 10 or more years of journalism experience.
It’s important to note that the findings do not shed light on how journalists vet individual research articles for quality but rather on how they evaluate the trustworthiness of the journals where those articles are published. In addition, the small study sample may not be representative of all health and science journalists.
Three issues from the interview responses stood out to Fleerackers:
First, some journalists had never heard of predatory publishing or journals and asked the researchers to define it.
“This isn’t common knowledge necessarily among even experienced science journalists,” Fleerackers says.
Second, journalists who did know about predatory journals perceived them as a problem for their peers, or a problem in theory, but not one they would ever fall for themselves.
“This confidence to me was surprising, this general lack of concern,” she says.
Third, most journalists tend to rely on prestige and top-tier journals in their reporting.
A wariness of predatory publishing among journalists may discourage journalists from reporting on research published in smaller, lesser-known journals and open-access journals, even though those journals may have as robust a peer review process as their elite competitors. It could also lead to exclusion of early-career researchers and those who are not considered highly visible or celebrity scientists, according to the study.
“I think it’s much more important for journalists to actually practice some epistemic humility and fact-checking than worry about these sorts of labels as predatory or not,” says Ivan Oransky, co-founder of the popular blog Retraction Watch and Distinguished Journalist in Residence at New York University’s Carter Journalism Institute, who was not involved in the study. Oransky is an adviser to Fleerackers on a separate long-term project involving accountability science journalism.
What journalists said in study interviews
The journalists’ interview responses show they vary widely in their knowledge of predatory journals and their approach to selecting studies.
One participant said they vet study quality and hadn’t “really put a lot of thought into the journals themselves.”
Another respondent, a journalist with a Ph.D. in a STEM field and a previous career in academia, pointed out that the journals’ status is not stationary: “Some publications I used to consider credible five or six years ago, when I was doing my research, are now … moving in a real predatory direction with the quality criteria decreasing and peer review decreasing.”
And one respondent said that it can be “hard to tell what the line is between predatory and not predatory. Arguably, a lot of practices of a lot of the big journals that we read, I think, are predatory.”
One journalist said that they would never encounter predatory journals because “generally, the ones that I consult are pretty well established.” Another journalist explained: “I don’t need to go that far to get information … I don’t look beyond the — you know, the really, the mainstream journals.”
Some journalists were more cautious about relying on reputable journals only and said they wouldn’t report on something from a journal that they had never heard of.
“I vet research largely by the publication that it’s in. So, if it’s in a weird publication, I sort of don’t know whether to trust it or not. I usually just don’t, because I don’t, I sort of don’t know. I’m like, well, it would be in a better publication if it were trustworthy,” one journalist said in the interview.
When assessing journals’ publication and editorial practices, the reporters said they look at the quality or presence of the peer review process. One said predatory journals “have no filtering process,” while another said, “Well, they don’t do this peer review or they say that they do peer review, but at the end, the data is not confident.”
(Reputation and peer review are important to consider but they are not infallible safeguards. Bad quality or flawed research can and does get published in high-quality or prestigious journals.)
Some respondents said they looked at a journal’s funding model as an important clue for its credibility. They said that predatory journals operated on “a sort of profit-driven motive,” charging authors “a high cost of pay to play to publish in them.”
When the researchers asked about open access journals — often referred to as OA — many journalists saw them as an ethical and fair way of sharing publicly financed science. But they also saw OA as a front for publishers with predatory and exploitative motives, the study authors note.
“I feel self-conscious about saying that because I’m sure that there are open access publishers that are great,” one respondent said.
Even though some journalists might mistakenly conflate predatory journals and open-access journals, the two are different.
Open access is a model of academic publishing that provides free access to research publications to anyone with an internet connection. The movement has emerged in response to several factors, including rising journal costs and disparities in accessing scholarship. There are more than 22,000 journals in 89 languages in the Directory of Open Access Journals.
There’s also a rich open-access publishing system in Latin America, so journalists could in fact be overlooking legitimate, high-quality research from different parts of the world by mainly focusing on prestige journals, Fleerackers says.
“I would much prefer to see journalists, in an ideal world, start by asking, ‘Does this seem like high-quality research?’ rather than, ‘Is this published in a top journal?’” Fleerackers says.
A practical first step is checking the quality of the paper, Fleerackers says, followed by checking the quality of the journal it is published in.
Additional reading
Funders and Universities Urged to Join Fight Against Paper Mills
Sophie Hogan. Research Professional News, September 2025.
Journals Infiltrated With ‘Copycat’ Papers That Can Be Written by AI
Miryam Naddaf. Nature News, September 2025.
Evaluating the Visual Design of Science Publications — A Quantitative Approach Comparing Legitimate and Predatory Journal Papers
Andreas Siess. Scientometrics, August 2025.
Fraudulent Scientific Papers Are Rapidly Increasing, Study Finds
Carl Zimmer. The New York Time, August 2025.
How to spot a predatory conference, and what science needs to do about them: a guide
Nature, Career Feature. Christine Ro, July 2024.
Making Science Public: A Review of Journalists’ Use of Open Access Research
Alice Fleerackers, et al. F1000 Research, January 2024.
Predatory Journals: What They Are and How to Avoid Them
Susan A. Elmore and Eleanor H. Weston. Toxicologic Pathology, June 2020.
Predatory Journals: No Definition, No Defence
Agnes Grudniewicz, et al. Nature Comment, December 2019.
Who Is Actually Harmed by Predatory Publishers?
Martin Paul Eve and Ernesto Priego, August 2017.
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