TY - JOUR T1 - A Critical Appraisal of Predatory Journals in Pathology JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/482174 SP - 482174 AU - Yaman M. AlAhmad AU - Ibrahim Abdelhafez AU - Farhan S. Cyprian AU - Faruk Skenderi AU - Saghir Akhtar AU - Semir Vranic Y1 - 2018/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/12/04/482174.abstract N2 - Predatory or pseudo journals have recently come into focus due to their massive internet expansion and extensive spam email soliciting. Recent studies explored this urging problem in several biomedical disciplines. In the present study, we identified 69 potential predatory (pseudo) pathology journals that were contrasted to 89 legitimate pathology journals obtained from the major bibliographic databases. All potential predatory journals in pathology shared at least one of the features proposed by previous studies (e.g. a poor web-site integrity, submissions via email, unclear or ambiguous peer-review process, missing names of the editorial board members, missing or pending the journal ISSN). Twenty-one (30%) of the potential predatory pathology journals had misleading titles mimicking those of legitimate journals. Only one of the identified journals was listed in the Directory of Open Access journals whereas none (0%) was indexed in PubMed/MEDLINE or Web of Science, listed in the Committee on Publication Ethics nor have they had a legitimate impact factor in the Journal Citation Reports. ER -