Introducing: ReviewerZero Journal Monitor

As a publisher, wouldn't it be good to know if one of your journals is at risk of being delisted from major databases? As an author, wouldn't it be good to know if a journal you are planning to submit to has a history of questionable practices, risking your reputation?

We are excited to announce the Journal Monitor, a predictive tool that helps you identify and address issues early.

From Research to a Real-World Tool

We developed the Journal Monitor, a tool that analyzes thousands of journals and highlights those showing potential red flags, so that experts can investigate further. This tool is essentially an implementation of the methods developed in our research (Zhuang, Liang, and Acuna (2025)), translated into an interactive platform for real-world use.

How Does the Journal Monitor Work?

We can outline the main indicators the journal monitor examines when scoring a journal. These features were inspired by the research findings and best-practice checklists (like DOAJ’s criteria):

• Editorial Board Makeup: The tool checks the composition of a journal’s editorial board. For instance, are the listed editors and advisors recognized researchers with credible affiliations? A journal whose board lacks any well-known experts, or lists many duplicate names across suspect journals, raises a flag.
• Citation Patterns: Unusual bibliometric trends are another clue. The monitor looks at metrics like the journal’s self-citation rate (do a large fraction of its articles cite the journal itself or a small group of authors repeatedly?), the typical impact of its authors, and how the journal’s citation patterns compare to its peers.
• Website Design and Content Signals: The very look and structure of a journal’s website can provide hints. The tool analyzes elements of the site and layout for patterns often seen in questionable publishers (for example, templated sites reused across multiple questionable journals). It also checks for the presence and quality of key content pages: Does the journal site include a clear aims and scope, editorial policies, and ethical guidelines? Absence or vagueness in these sections can be a warning sign. Even visual cues – like a homepage that is just a generic template – contribute to the score. These web design signals are subtle but useful when combined with other indicators.
• Journal Metadata and History: The monitor reviews a journal’s basic facts: its age, publisher, indexing status, and retractions. A very new journal that started publishing only recently isn’t suspicious by itself, but if it ticks several other boxes (new and highly self-citing and lacking credible editors, for example), it adds to concern. In terms of retractions, while our tool does not need retractions or expressions of concerns — it is predictive in that sense — we still use that information as additional context.

Assisting Experts

It’s worth emphasizing that the journal monitor is a screening tool meant to assist human experts – not an oracle that issues final judgments. Every journal flagged by the system is meant to be reviewed by a librarian, editor, or research integrity officer before any action is taken. That is why we are working with publishers to trial our tool and get feedback.

Get Started

Visit our website to learn more about our services or contact us at hi@reviewerzero.com to discuss how we can help protect your research integrity.