Below are some journals (just one so far) that very frequently solicit my expert opinions, without really checking whether I have the expertise or not, and without any impact factor.
Resources I use to check the credibility of unknown journals:
- Thomson ISI
- Scopus
- And ArnetMiner for academic ranks
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
Founded in 1997 in Cairo
. currently employs more than 300 employees
. Publishes 200+ open access, peer-reviewed journals.
. Open-access is financed by author fees i.e. non-subscription based.. The author fee currently "tops out at $1,500"
. recently partnered with Sage, a well-established e-journal publisher
22 of the 300 journals have an impact factor higher than 0 for the printed (not online) versions, but below
- 4.774 according to the Hindawai home page and Thomson ISI (2011, from 2012)
- based on the years that the printed ISSN 1741-427X was run by BMC
- the online version ISSN 1741-4288 is not registered!
- 2.964 according to Research Gate and the University Putra Malaysia
Some other researchers impressions: http://list.uvm.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=MEDLIB-L;wGArog;20110726180255-0700d
I have been solicited to write an expert article for the following journals the past year. Even though I feel flattered, I would not think too much of researchers that publish in these journals with zero impact factor (and not just because they are too new to calculate the factors!)
- Advances in Bioinformatics (Impact factor: 0, Registered in PubMed Central)
- Soha Labib is soliciting a large number of potential authors: July, May, March
- Nada Qassem is soliciting MANY authors: January
- Four good colleagues of mine, Jörg Hakenberg, Goran Nenadic, Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhmann, and Jin-Dong Kim edited a Special Issue in May 2011
- Lina Afify was soliciting my participation in a special issue that I know little about in August 2011, and it is still not registered even on Google Scholar!
- Advances in Artificial Intelligence (No impact factor, Only registered in INSPEC)
- Soha Labib is soliciting MANY authors: February 2012
- Rana Ashour was soliciting MANY authors for an NLP issue: March-June 2011
- Artificial Evolution and Applications (ISSN: 1687-6229, completely removed from the Hindawi home page list of journals! Why?)
- Launched in 2007, soliciting entire conferences and mailing lists in January 2010, completely GONE in 2012!
- ISRN Bioinformatics (no impact)
- Marwa Elmasri was soliciting entire mailing lists in July 2011
- Molecular Biology International (no impact)
- Engy Edward was soliciting MANY authors until December 2009. Still NO IMPACT FACTOR!
- Sequencing (No impact factor, Only indexed by Chemical Abstracts
- Reem Ali is soliciting MANY authors (I haven't published ANYTHING on Sequencing!): 2012