Thus urge caution against relying on AJPC at present. The SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) ranks journals into four quartiles (Q1–Q4). SJR serves as a safelist for journal selection, when trying to avoid predatory journals, as journals that have been indexed by SJR are seen as having stringent publishing standards.
An AI-based tool, the Academic Journal Predatory Checking System (AJPC), claims to be able to differentiate suspected predatory journals from normal journals. In study, scientists asked (25 March 2023) AJPC to classify the top 2500 journals (based on SJR ranking). Was found that 65.64% of these journals were classified as “suspected predatory”, 33.28% were classified as “normal”, while 1.08% of the journals could not be classified. A follow-up run (30 March 2023) returned different results (89.20%, 10.16% and 0.64%).
This set of results is worrying, not only because of the number of SJR journals that are thought to be “predatory”, but also because of the difference in results when using the same tool a matter of days apart. Was extended our analysis and looked at seven stand-alone publishers (Elsevier, Frontiers, MDPI, OMICS, Springer Nature (incl. Nature Portfolio), Taylor & Francis and Wiley). In total, was asked AJPC to classify 17,721 journals. 100% (4756) of Elsevier journals were classified as “suspected predatory”. Even Springer Nature (which includes the journal that published the AJPC paper) has journals which were classified at “suspected predatory”.
