Post actualizado el día octubre 26, 2026 by DeiviSanzPlay
Stop wasting time on Wikipedia. If you’re still using it as your main source for academic work, you’re not doing research—you’re just reading summaries. The real game is played in scientific databases, and the good news is that you can find solid articles in just three clicks. But you need to know where to click.
Let me be blunt: Google Scholar is your starting point, not your destination. It’s a crawler that indexes everything from peer-reviewed papers to university press releases. That’s why you need to use advanced search operators. If you don’t, you’ll end up citing a press release as if it were a study. And that, in an academic context, is suicide.
Google Scholar: Use It Like a Pro, Not Like a Tourist
The first click is obvious: go to Google Scholar and type your keywords. But here’s the trick—use quotation marks for exact phrases, and the filetype:pdf operator to get full texts. For example: «predatory journals» filetype:pdf. That alone filters out a ton of garbage.
The second click is the advanced search option. There you can specify author, publication, and date range. If you’re looking for recent research, set the date to the last five years. That’s how you avoid outdated studies that have already been debunked.
The third click? That’s where most people fail. Don’t just click on the first result. Look at the citations, the journal name, and the authors’ affiliations. If the journal sounds generic and the authors are from a university you’ve never heard of, be suspicious. Finding scientific articles in 3 clicks is possible, but you need to know how to evaluate what you find.
The Dark Side of Academic Publishing: Hijacked Journals
Now, let me tell you something that almost no one explains when you start in the academic world: predatory journals have evolved. They no longer just invent fake journals. Now they hijack real ones. They buy a similar domain—one letter changed, an extra hyphen—and copy the entire website. Design, editorial committee, back issues. Everything.
You get an email that looks legitimate. It has the name of the real journal, the impact factor, everything. They tell you your article fits perfectly in a special issue and that if you pay the APCs—which they make reasonable—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? Truly predatory journals have learned to sneak into prestigious indexes. There are already cases of journals indexed in Scopus and Web of Science engaging in fraudulent practices: flooding with special issues, accepting articles without real review, artificially boosting citations. If a journal is in Clarivate’s Master Journal List, people assume it’s reliable. But that’s no longer the case.
How to Spot a Hijacked Journal Before It’s Too Late
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 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. 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. There have been cases of journals that were in DOAJ and were later removed for bad practices.
The Detective Work: Tools to Verify a Journal’s Legitimacy
I’m going to tell you how my cousin saved 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 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.
What to Do If You’ve Already Fallen for a Predatory Journal
Okay, I’ve told you how to avoid them, but now comes what no one wants to hear. 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: don’t beat yourself up with guilt. Predatory journals are designed to catch the people who most need to publish. 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.
Retraction: The Painful but Necessary Step
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 there. You can try to update your profile to hide it, but the damage is done. The lesson? Finding scientific articles in 3 clicks is easy, but publishing in the right place requires much more than three clicks. It requires diligence, skepticism, and a good dose of paranoia.
So next time you’re tempted by a fast publication, remember: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. And in academia, your reputation is the only currency that really matters.
