cfku / check-bib-for-predatory

check-bib-for-predatory - Double-check your bibliography (BibTeX, bib) for predatory publishers and journals

check-bib-for-predatory

Double-check your bibliography (BibTeX, bib) for predatory publishers and journals

Why?

In order to ensure that no articles from predatory journals or publishers are cited, the tool compares the well-known predatory journals and publishers with your bibliography (BibTeX file). The titles in your bib file are compared with the well-known titles of the predatory journals based on cosine similarity score.

Getting Started

Dependencies

• Miniconda or Anaconda

Requirements

• Install 'predatory' environment from environment.yml

# Install 'predatory' environment from environment.yml 
$ conda env create -n predatory -f environment.yml

Minimal example

# Activate 'predatory' environment
$ conda activate predatory
$ python check-bib.py bib-file-to-be-checked.bib
[...]

# Refresh the local predatory journal cache before checking (! local cache will be overwritten)
$ python check-bib.py bib-file-to-be-checked.bib --refresh
[...]

Sources for predatory journals and publishers used

• https://beallslist.net/
• https://beallslist.net/standalone-journals/

Possible enhancements:

• CSV files in https://github.com/stop-predatory-journals/stop-predatory-journals.github.io/tree/master/_data (instead of crawling)

Feel free to extend it.

Disclaimer

The used sources might not be complete. So in case you use this tool, make sure to use an up to date predatory journal repository.

License

This project is licensed under the terms of the MIT license - see the LICENSE file for details.

check-bib-for-predatory's Issues

Add hijacked journals from beallslist.net

Spotting hijacked journals would be interesting too, but might need a different crawler because of the different page structure. I'm not familiar with how the crawling works, so I will not do it right now.
Here is the list of hijacked journals from beallslist.

Too many newlines in cache files after crawling

Hi,
after crawling there are too many newlines in the .csv file so that reading the csv back in fails.
This is on windows, for now I have just removed them with Notepad++ manually, which is inconvenient.

Link to scam/lottery site in the README.md

Hello,
It seems that the first 3 links in the readme point towards scam websites:

• https://predatoryjournals.com/journals/
• https://predatoryjournals.com/hijacked/
• https://predatoryjournals.com/publishers/

I hope it does not infer with the inner working of your app.

Fofusa

Beallslist moved

Hi,
https://beallslist.weebly.com/ moved to an independend server: https://beallslist.net/

Add CSV files from stop-predatory-journals.github.io directly (crawling not required)

Add CSV files in https://github.com/stop-predatory-journals/stop-predatory-journals.github.io/tree/master/_data as source directly

Failure to handle utf8 correctly on windows

Hi,
first off, thanks for the program, it's really helpful.
Sadly, the program does not work out of the box for me because Python has a problem with character encodings. Adding "encoding="utf8"" to the open calls in lines 94 and 133 fixes it for me.

Add "source" to report

Add source of predatory journal name to index (and report), to distinguish between real and hijacked journal properly.