Version 1.0 20.11.2025 Publication Forum (JUFO) Checklist of Problematic Practices in Scientific Journals’ Editorial and Quality Assessment1 Invitations 1. Researchers are repeatedly spammed by email to act as authors, reviewers, and/or editors. 2. Researchers are invited to contribute to journals or special/theme issues outside their field of expertise. 3. Prominent researchers are enticed to become authors, reviewers or editors by offering discounts or waivers on publication fees. Editorial Process 4. Reviewer invitation/selection and/or publication decisions are made automatically without active editorial decision-making. 5. Editors have limited or restricted opportunities to influence who is invited to review and which manuscripts are published. 6. Editors are pressured or encouraged to increase the number of articles processed and/or accepted for publication. 7. Researchers are required to revise, review, or perform editorial tasks within unreasonably short deadlines. Peer Review 8. Researchers frequently receive low-quality or superficial peer review reports. 9. Reviews are provided by individuals lacking expertise in the specific field of the submitted research. 10. A reviewer suggesting changes to a manuscript is not given the opportunity to verify whether the corrections have been properly implemented before publication. 11. A reviewer or editor recommending rejection or not meeting deadline is removed from the process or replaced or bypassed.
Version 1.0 JUFO Checklist 20.11.2025 Publication Decisions 12. Published articles have often been recommended for rejection by reviewers (either in the same or another journal). 13. The editorial or review process for special/theme issues is often handled by guest editors rather than the journal’s own editorial team. 14. Published articles are regularly authored by editors or editorial board members. 15. The volume of publications increases at an unusually rapid pace within a short time. Published Research 16. Published research frequently falls outside the stated scope of the journal, or the scope is vaguely defined. 17. Published articles contain a disproportionately high number of self-citations to the journal or to the authors’ own works. 18. Editors or reviewers regularly request the addition of citations to published articles without scientific justification. 19. Published research is repeatedly of poor quality or is compromised by research misconduct, unacceptable practices, or inappropriately AI-generated content. 1 This checklist has been developed by the Publication Forum (in Finnish Julkaisufoorumi, in short JUFO) to help field-specific expert-panels in evaluating if publication channel meets level 1 criteria of JUFO classification. The checklist contains 19 practices that may indicate problems or raise concerns about thoroughness and reliability of the journal’s editorial and peer review practices. The checklist is not for predatory or questionable journals but focuses on journals aiming to increase the number of publications and/or to minimize the time spend for editorial work and quality assessment. In JUFO, these journals are increasingly difficult to evaluate because they may formally meet the level 1 criteria, such as peer review and editorial board of experts in the field, but the scientific quality assessment may not work thoroughly and reliably down the line. The checklist is a tool for identifying, documenting (where possible), and considering a range of problematic practices more systematically and holistically on a journal-by-journal basis. JUFO panels are free to experiment and implement this tool in their evaluation processes. This is a first version of the checklist, and it will be developed by the JUFO secretariat with the steering board, expert panels, and other expert communities. If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact
[email protected].
