Have you ever been approached by agents or publishers offering to publish your work? If the contact was not initiated by you, there is a possibility that they are representing a predatory journal. Predatory journals are those which charge fees without proper editorial and publishing services. In order to help you Library and Learning Support offer quite a bit of guidance on spotting predatory journals and conferences.

Familiarising yourself with journal rankings and bibliometrics is also a good way of recognising good-quality journals.

Remember that BU Library subscribes to Web of Science and Scopus, two of the most important citation databases. These can be accessed through our alphabetical list of databases. Web of Science and Scopus index some of the most high quality journals. This can be really useful when deciding where to publish your work.

Check the Directory of Open Access Journals. DOAJ is an independent database of good quality, open access, peer reviewed journals.

Scimago is another good source of information to confirm the quality of a journal. This resource contains additional indices of journals.

In case of doubt regarding a journal, please contact your Faculty Library Team for help and advice.