Predatory Journals Lists Compared: Beall, Cabells, DOAJ and How to Check a Journal Yourself

Search for a predatory journals list and you will find dozens of pages promising one. Most are recycled spreadsheets with the current year in the title. A few are maintained by serious organisations. Telling them apart takes about ten minutes of reading, and that is cheaper than a wasted article processing charge or a line on your CV you later have to explain.

The underlying problem is that “predatory” is a judgement about behaviour, not a legal category. One journal may accept almost everything and invent an editorial board. Another may be a poorly run but sincere start-up that has not yet built a peer review process. Lists differ because their compilers draw that line in different places, and because journals change. A title that was careless in 2019 may have cleaned up by 2026, and a respectable one may have been sold to an owner with different incentives.

This guide compares the four sources researchers meet most often (Beall's list, Cabells Predatory Reports, the Directory of Open Access Journals, and hijacked-journal checkers), says what each can and cannot show you, and ends with a routine you can run on any journal in about fifteen minutes.

Beall's List: Historical Value, Limited Current Use

Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado Denver, began publishing lists of suspect open access publishers and standalone journals around 2010. His blog became the reference point for the whole topic and introduced the phrase “predatory publishing” to many researchers. In January 2017 he took the site down. Accounts of the circumstances vary, so it is safest to say only that the original list stopped being updated at that point.

Copies survive. Archived versions exist on the Internet Archive and elsewhere, and anonymous groups have continued posting lists under the Beall name. This is where careful readers should slow down. An archived copy is a snapshot of one person's judgement as of early 2017. It cannot tell you whether a journal founded in 2020 is sound, and it cannot tell you whether a flagged publisher has since reformed.

Beall's criteria were also criticised at the time. Some observers argued that they leaned against smaller publishers in lower-income countries and that the route for challenging a listing was weak. You do not need to settle that debate to use the list sensibly. Treat a listing as a prompt to look harder, never as a verdict, and treat the absence of a listing as telling you nothing.

Cabells Predatory Reports: The Maintained Option, Behind a Subscription

Cabells, a commercial scholarly analytics company, launched its blacklist in 2017 and now calls the product Predatory Reports. It is the closest thing to a maintained successor to Beall's list. According to a February 2026 Cabells announcement, the database held a little over 20,000 journals at the end of January 2026, each assessed against a published set of behavioural criteria.

The criteria are the useful part. They are grouped by theme (integrity, peer review, publication practices, claims about indexing and metrics, fees, copyright and business practices, website conduct) and breaches are graded as severe, moderate or minor. Earlier versions listed 64 and then 74 criteria, and Cabells says it revises them with community input. Because the criteria are public, you can use them as a checklist even if your library does not license the database.

There are two practical limits. The first is access. Predatory Reports is a paid product, so many authors can only reach it through a university library, and clinicians outside academic institutions often cannot. The second is lag. A database of 20,000 titles is large, yet new journals appear faster than any one team can review them, and a journal that is not listed may simply be unreviewed. Cabells also runs a separate directory of vetted journals, Journalytics, and has said that removal from that directory does not mean a journal has been added to the predatory list. Do not read one as the mirror image of the other.

DOAJ: A Whitelist With a Narrow Remit

The Directory of Open Access Journals takes the opposite approach. Instead of naming bad actors, it lists open access journals that have applied and passed a review against published criteria. Its vetting tightened after 2014, when it re-evaluated existing entries, and journals that stop meeting the standard can be removed. It is free to search and it is one of the better single checks for an open access title.

What DOAJ cannot do is cover everything. It lists only fully open access journals, so a subscription or hybrid title will not appear and that absence means nothing. A journal also has to apply, which means a good new journal may not be listed yet. And DOAJ screens journal practices, not individual articles. Treat a listing as a strong positive signal, and treat a gold open access journal that claims a DOAJ listing it does not have as a serious warning. Verify the claim by searching DOAJ by title or ISSN, never by trusting a badge on the journal's own website.

DOAJ is also one of the organisations behind the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing, developed with COPE, OASPA and WAME. The document is short and readable, and it sets out what a legitimate journal should disclose: its peer review process, ownership, editorial board, fees, copyright and archiving. It is a better template for your own evaluation than most checklists on the web.

Hijacked Journals Need Their Own Check

A hijacked journal is a clone. Someone builds a website that imitates a real, often older or less digitally active journal, borrows its title and ISSN, and collects submissions and fees. Blacklists built around publisher behaviour often miss these, because the name on the page belongs to a respectable journal.

Retraction Watch maintains a Hijacked Journal Checker, compiled with the researcher Anna Abalkina, that lists confirmed cases. A clean result means only that the case has not been verified, not that the site is genuine. Recent research on medical titles shows the problem is live. A 2026 study reported that following the outbound links of six known hijacked medical journals led to four more suspected ones, and an earlier commentary found that clones can appear among the top search results for medical keywords. I have read these only at abstract level, so treat the specific numbers as indicative.

The defence is simple and slightly tedious. Do not reach a journal through a search result or an email link. Go to the publisher's main site, or to the journal's record in PubMed or the ISSN portal, and compare the URL, editor names and contact details with what you were given. If they do not match, stop.

What Lists Cannot Tell You

Every list is a proxy for the thing you care about, which is whether this journal will handle your paper honestly. Lists miss the borderline cases, and the borderline cases are where careful authors get caught. A mid-sized publisher with a real editorial office can still run a special issue programme that waves papers through, and several large publishers have retracted many papers after problems in guest-edited issues. We cover that pattern in our piece on guest-edited special issues and peer review risks.

Lists also say little about reputation within a field. A journal can be absent from every blacklist and still be one your department would not count towards promotion. Conversely, some national bodies have downgraded journals from established publishers without calling them predatory at all. The Frontiers debate is a good example, and our evidence-based look at Frontiers shows why a binary label is a poor tool.

Indexing is not a clean proxy either. Being in Scopus or Web of Science is a useful filter, since both run selection processes and can delist titles, but indexers have made mistakes in both directions. Use it as one input among several. The practical details are in our guide to verifying journal indexing.

How to Check if a Journal Is Predatory: A Five-Step Routine

When a list gives you a flag, or an invitation email arrives out of the blue, run the same short routine each time. It takes less time than waiting for a library to answer an email.

Step three is the one people skip. Researchers who discover they have been listed as editors without consent have complained publicly for years, and a short email to a named editor is a direct test. Step four matters more than it seems. A journal that publishes papers with turnaround of a few days, no peer review dates and implausible methods is telling you everything you need to know.

Keep the evidence. A saved note with the dates you checked, the DOAJ or PubMed record and any editor replies is useful if a co-author, funder or promotion committee later asks why you chose the journal. For a wider selection process, see our guide to avoiding predatory journals.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best predatory journals list?

There is no single best one. Cabells Predatory Reports is the most actively maintained and has public criteria, but it is paid. DOAJ is free and useful as a positive screen for open access titles. Beall's list is a historical archive. Combine at least two sources with your own checks.

Is Beall's list still updated?

No. The original was taken down in January 2017. Pages that claim to be an updated Beall's list are run by other people, and their methods are often unclear.

Does charging an article processing charge make a journal predatory?

No. Many respected open access journals charge fees. The warning sign is hidden or late fee disclosure, not the existence of a charge. Our guide to article processing charges explains what normal looks like.

The Practical Takeaway

Use lists the way a clinician uses a screening test: a positive result sends you to confirm, and a negative result should not make you relax. Before your next submission, spend fifteen minutes on the five checks above and keep the evidence beside your submission folder. If your institution has a library liaison, ask whether it licenses Cabells. It is a small habit that protects the one thing you cannot take back once a paper is published in the wrong place, which is your name on it.

Further Reading