Marthie van Niekerk

Since the early 2000s, several studies have been conducted to describe the characteristics of predatory journals (Beall, 2013c; Crawford, 2014, 2017; Shen and Björk, 2015; Xia, 2015; Shamseer et al., 2017). Furthermore, Shamseer and colleagues (2017) argue that academics often cannot differentiate between a predatory and a legitimate journal (Shamseer et al., 2017).

It is the overall aim of this study to provide a framework to distinguish predatory from legitimate journals. In order to achieve this aim, the more specific objectives are to identify the characteristics of a predatory journal, to develop a quality control framework, and to develop and test an index with indicators to identify whether a journal is predatory or not.