(28 Oct 2026) Researchers have identified three warning signs that suggest journals might be engaging in suspicious publishing activities. Using these, they have found dozens of titles indexed in the leading scholarly database Scopus that could be problematic.
The three red flags are, for any given journal in a single year: a doubling of publication output; having more than 70% of published articles originating from a single country; and having at least 15% of articles flagged by the Problematic Paper Screener, a free online tool.
Using titles extracted from the freely available database OpenAlex, the researchers identified 3,753 journals that met at least one of these criteria. They cross-referenced these with journals indexed in Scopus and found that, of those, 5% had been delisted. The findings were published in a preprint on 20 October.
The researchers, and research-integrity specialists, say that the signals help to identify journals that merit further investigation — but do not prove that titles are problematic. They serve as “rudimentary flags”, says Achal Agrawal, a co-author of the preprint and freelance data scientist in Raipur, India. And they indicate the problems that databases face as poor publishing practices proliferate, he adds.
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