Post actualizado el día September 27, 2026 by DeiviSanzPlay
Now I’ll tell you something that almost no one explains when you start out in the academic world: all this Google Scholar stuff, or whatever many people and official sites of any academy or university environment call it. You can search, searching for keywords in.
That’s why it’s important to know how to do searches, how to consult, review, or look at each, the.
You ask yourself questions, you don’t understand what’s happening with your account or your. And Google Scholar, which is a crawling machine, swallows them whole without asking.
That’s why the first thing I learned is that here you have to be smarter than the algorithm. You can’t write as if you were asking a question on the street. The key is to use Google Scholar in Spanish but with the advanced search filter. If you don’t use the operators, that search engine will return even a university press release, and that’s not a research article with it indexed
Okay, I’ll continue with the Google Scholar mess, but now I have to tell you the latest and most twisted thing. Because if before phantom journals were easy to spot thanks to the bad website or emails in Spanglish, now they’ve gotten sophisticated. And this is where your work goes down the drain without you even realizing it.
It turns out that now they don’t need to invent a journal for you. Now what they do is hijack one that already exists. Let me give you an example: a real journal, with years of prestige, indexed in Scopus, with its official ISSN. Suddenly, someone buys a similar domain—one letter changed, an extra hyphen—and copies the entire website. The design, the names of the editorial committee, the back issues, everything copied.
You receive an email that looks legitimate. It has the name of the real journal, the impact factor, everything. They tell you that your article fits perfectly in a special issue and that if you pay the APCs—which they make reasonable, neither too high nor too low—they’ll publish it in two weeks. And you, who have been trying to publish for months, fall for it. You pay. And your article goes to a phantom website that no one will read because it’s not indexed anywhere real.
The worst part is that now truly predatory journals have learned to sneak into prestigious indexes. There are already cases of journals indexed in Scopus and Web of Science that are engaging in fraudulent practices. How? Well, by flooding with special issues, accepting articles without real review, and artificially boosting their citations. And if the journal is in Clarivate’s Master Journal List, people assume it’s reliable. But that’s no longer the case.
My cousin, the one doing his thesis, came across one of these. The journal was in the Journal Citation Reports, it had an impact factor, it was in quartile 2. But when he started looking, each issue had forty articles, half of them were on topics that had nothing to do with the editorial line, and acceptance times were ten days. That’s not peer review, that’s a printing press with a flat rate. And the university library told him clearly: “if you publish there, we won’t count it for your accreditation.”
The key here is that you can’t even trust indexing. Because before, Beall’s list was the bible for knowing where not to publish, but Beall closed his list in 2017 and although there are attempts to maintain it, no one has achieved the same level of updating. Now you have to be the detective yourself.
The trick that really works is one a university librarian taught me: don’t just search whether the journal is in Scopus, search in Scimago Journal Rank—there you see the SJR, which is the impact factor adjusted for citation quality—and then look at the quartile. But don’t stop there. Look at the evolution over the last few years. If a journal went from quartile 4 to quartile 2 in two years, something strange is going on. Or if it suddenly has massive publications from authors from a single country, that too.
And another thing: the Directory of Open Access Journals—DOAJ—is still one of the most reliable whitelists. If the journal is there, at least you know it has passed a serious filter. But be careful, even that isn’t infallible. Because there have also been cases of journals that were in DOAJ and were later removed for bad practices.
I’m going to tell you how my cousin came up with a way to save his skin. He took the name of the suspicious journal, went to the Retraction Watch page—which has a database of hijacked journals—and searched for it. It didn’t appear on the list of hijacked journals, but it did appear in forums of academics talking about it. And he found a thread where someone said they had received the same email and that the journal’s real domain was .org, not .com. That’s when he realized.
The big problem with this is that if you publish in a hijacked journal without knowing it, you can’t get your article back afterward. It’s not in any database, it doesn’t count for your CV, and on top of that you’ve paid. And if you realize before paying, they might even threaten you with lawsuits so you don’t back out. That’s how they operate.
So the summary is: Google Scholar takes you to the door, but crossing it is up to you. If a journal has the name of one you know, but the domain doesn’t match the original publisher’s, close the browser. And if they write to you before you’ve submitted anything, delete the email. Because in this publishing business, cheap turns out expensive, and fast turns out extremely expensive.
And now what do I do if I’ve already fallen for it: the agony of realizing too late
Okay, I’ve told you how to avoid them, but now comes what no one wants to hear. Because maybe you’ve already fallen. Maybe a few months ago you paid those eight hundred euros, received the “accepted” email, and now you have the URL hanging on your CV. And you’re starting to suspect.
I understand because it happened to me with an article I wrote years ago, at the beginning, when predatory journals weren’t talked about as much. I paid, I published, and one day a colleague looked at me with a “seriously?” face and said: “Hey, do you know that journal is on the blacklist?” My world came crashing down.
The first piece of advice I give you: don’t beat yourself up with guilt. Because predatory journals are designed to catch the people who most need to publish. And now even full professors with years of experience have fallen at some point. You’re not stupid, you’re the victim of a business that makes millions a year. And the worst part is that these guys have become experts at imitating what’s legitimate.
The first thing you have to do is confirm whether it really is predatory. Don’t trust your gut feeling. Go to the list of predatory journals maintained by Stop Predatory Journals, which is the one that has somewhat replaced Beall’s after he closed it in 2017. If it appears there, there’s no doubt. If it doesn’t appear, maybe it’s more subtle.
There’s also a page called Think. Check. Submit. which is like a pregnancy test for journals. They ask you questions: do you know the editor? Is it indexed in DOAJ? Is the review process clearly explained? If you fail three questions in a row, get out of there.
But the definitive confirmation is one that a researcher from the University of Ottawa who studies this taught me: search for review articles on predatory journals in Google Scholar and see if your journal appears in the lists they cite. There’s a very good 2019 article in Nature that talks about the lack of a clear definition, but that lists suspicious practices. If your journal does all of those, there’s no doubt.
Now, if you’ve already confirmed that it’s predatory, what do you do? The answer is ugly: most likely you can’t get your money back. Those pages operate from countries without clear laws, with bank accounts in tax havens. I’ve seen people try to file claims through PayPal and be told that “the service was provided.” Because technically they published you, even if it’s garbage.
The option that does work, although it hurts, is to retract the article. Some predatory journals have a retraction clause in their contract. If you invoke it, they may refund part of the money, but don’t get your hopes up. What matters here isn’t the money, it’s your name. Because if that fake article appears in Google Scholar associated with your profile, any accreditation agency like ANECA will see it and raise an eyebrow.
What you can do is ask them to remove the article. Send a formal email, with acknowledgment of receipt, saying you want to withdraw the manuscript due to “duplication” or “errors in the data.” Sometimes it works because what they want is to avoid trouble. But be careful: even if you withdraw it, the URL may still be on the internet. And the record may remain in Google Scholar.
And here comes the toughest part: you can’t de-index something from Google Scholar. Once Google’s robot has crawled that article, it stays in its database. You can ask for it to be removed from your public profile, but the trace remains. That’s why it’s better not to reach that point.
A case a friend who works in a university library told me about: a doctoral student published in a predatory journal without realizing it. When she realized, she asked for a retraction and the journal refused. They told her that if she wanted to withdraw the article, she had to pay a penalty of 300 euros more. Can you imagine? Scamming you once and then trying to scam you again. That’s the last straw.
So, if you’re already in it, my recommendation is don’t dwell on the money. Consider that investment lost. What you have to do is never cite that article in future work again. Leave it there, as a reminder that you were played. And if someone asks you, be honest: “I published there before I knew about this.” The academic community understands, because many have been through the same thing.
And one last thing: if you’ve been invited to be an editor of a journal or to be part of its editorial board, and it’s predatory, resign immediately. Because if your name appears as an editor in one of those journals, that follows you. Accreditation agencies look not only at where you publish, but also at which journals you’re involved with. I’ve seen cases of people who have been denied their six-year research periods because their name was on a predatory journal as “associate editor” without ever having done a single review.
So now you know: if you’ve fallen for it, accept it, learn from it, and above all, don’t recommend that journal to anyone. Because the worst thing about predatory journals isn’t that they scam you, it’s that they create an ecosystem where junk science perpetuates itself. And that affects all of us.
How to clean up your Google Scholar profile without leaving a trace (even if you want to delete everything)
Okay, I’ll continue with the topic. You’ve fallen into a predatory journal, you’ve accepted it, and now you want to erase that stain from your digital CV. Well, let me tell you how it’s done, because it’s not as obvious as pressing a button and that’s it.
The first thing you need to know is that Google Scholar is not like LinkedIn. You can’t just delete a publication and have it disappear from the universe. What you can do is control your author profile, which is what people see when they search for you. If you have a public profile on Google Scholar, that junk article is probably sitting right there.
The trick I was taught at a university library is simple but you have to know it. You go to your Google Scholar profile, log in, and find the article in question. You check the box next to it and click “delete.” That easy. But be careful: this only removes it from your public profile, it doesn’t erase it from the internet. The article still exists on the predatory journal’s website and Google still has it indexed in its general search engine.
My cousin, the one doing his thesis, did this and felt relieved. But then he got an email from a colleague saying “hey, an article in a weird journal shows up under your name on Google Scholar.” And it’s that the author profile and the general search are two different things. If someone searches your name on Google Scholar without filtering, that article appears even if you’ve deleted it from your profile.
This is where the second move comes in. If you want that article to not appear associated with your name anywhere, you have to do what they call “claiming authorship” but in reverse. On Google Scholar there’s an option that says “review” or “make a correction.” There you can mark that you are not the author of that article. The system detects it and eventually unlinks it from your name. But it’s not immediate, it takes weeks sometimes.
The big problem comes when the article was slipped in without you knowing. Because predatory journals sometimes publish your name without you giving final approval. They send you the proofs, you don’t review them, and they publish anyway. I’ve seen cases where the researcher didn’t even know the article was published until someone told them. That’s when it gets tougher, because you have to deal with the journal to get it retracted.
Speaking of retractions, there’s a move that few people know about. Beall’s list is still the reference for knowing which journals are predatory. The original one was shut down in 2017, but it’s been revived at beallslist.net and they update it regularly. If your journal is on there, you have official confirmation. And if it’s on there, you can use it as an argument to request the retraction.
What I did when it happened to me was send an email to the journal saying: “I have discovered that your journal is on Beall’s list of predatory publications, so I request the immediate retraction of my article.” They replied two days later with an invoice for 200 euros for “administrative retraction costs.” I sent them another email saying that if they didn’t retract it, I was going to report them on their own country’s portal. They didn’t reply anymore. But three months later the article was no longer on their website. I don’t know if it was because of my email or because they closed the journal, but it disappeared.
The important thing here is that you don’t just sit back and do nothing. Because the damage of publishing in predatory journals isn’t just economic. In many accreditation systems, like ANECA in Spain or CONACYT in Mexico, having publications in predatory journals can get you rejected for a six-year research period or a scholarship. And the worst part is that once you’re rejected, it takes a whole three-year period to apply again. I’ve seen colleagues who lost years of their career over four articles in dubious journals.
Another thing you need to watch out for is Google Scholar’s auto-update. Many people have the option enabled for Google to automatically add new publications to their profile. This is super convenient, but also dangerous. Because if a predatory journal indexes you, Google adds it to your profile on its own. And if you don’t review it, you’re stuck with that junk associated with your name forever.
That’s why I recommend you disable that option. In your profile settings, you can change it so that instead of adding articles automatically, it sends you an email asking for review. That way you have control. Because later, cleaning up a profile with a hundred publications of which forty aren’t yours or are from junk journals is torture.
And speaking of cleaning up, if you already have your profile set up and haven’t reviewed it in years, I recommend you take a look at it some Sunday afternoon. It’s tedious, but necessary. Because Google Scholar sometimes assigns you articles from people with the same name as you, and those articles can be of dubious quality. So you end up with a profile that mixes your good stuff with things you haven’t written or that are from predatory journals. And someone who glances at it can’t tell the difference.
The last thing I’m going to tell you is about those damn citation statistics. When you have a junk article on your profile, even if you delete it, it can keep receiving citations from other junk articles. And those citations artificially inflate your metrics. But don’t get too happy, because when a serious evaluation committee sees that you have citations from predatory journals, they don’t count it as a merit. In fact, it’s another red flag. So not only do you lose, but you also paint a target on your back.
The moral of all this is that digital cleanup in the academic world is like hygiene: better to prevent than to cure. But if it’s already happened to you, you have tools to fix it. It’s not impossible, it’s just a pain. And most importantly: next time you’re about to publish, you’ll remember all of this and you’ll even check the editor’s last name. Because experience, even though bitter, is what teaches you the most.
