Alongside the increasing popularity of legitimate open access publishing, there has also been a rise in what is known as predatory (or questionable) publishing. Predatory publishers solicit and accept manuscripts and fees from authors, but do not provide the editorial and peer review services that are part of legitimate scholarly publishing.*

It is a good idea to be wary of publishers soliciting articles or conference presentations from you. The tools listed below can help you vet these opportunities.

*Bowman, J. D. (2014). Predatory Publishing, Questionable Peer Review, and Fraudulent Conferences. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, 78(10), 176. http://doi.org/10.5688/ajpe7810176

This site includes a series of questions you can ask yourself to help walk through the process of being a savvy author and avoiding untrustworthy publishers. It is the joint effort of a large number of trusted organizations involved in scholarly communications. 

The DOAJ is a membership organization as well as a community-curated list of reputable open access journals. This is a white list: Presence on the list indicates that the journal has been deemed trustworthy. Absence from the list does not necessarily mean a journal is predatory. You can search the list by journal, article, or browse by subject.

This organization vets publishers for quality before they can attain membership, so its Full List of Members serves as a kind of white list. The Resources tab provides helpful information on Open Access.

Journals that are indexed in MEDLINE go through a rigorous review process. Following the link above will take you to the full list of 5600+ journals, which can be considered another white list of reputable journals. ANDing the search with (nursing OR nurse*) provides a more focused list of approximately 260 nursing journals currently indexed in MEDLINE.

Please note that while being indexed in MEDLINE is an indication of quality, PubMed does include articles that are not indexed in MEDLINE. PubMed is not a white list.

Since being indexed in MEDLINE is an indicator of quality, but PubMed includes many non-MEDLINE journals, it can be helpful to limit PubMed search results to show MEDLINE journals only. This helps to ensure that predatory journals are not included in your results list.

Once you've searched in PubMed, look at the limits that show up on the left side of the screen:

Click on "Show additional filters" at the bottom of the list:

Check the box next to "Journal categories," then click "Show":

Now, "Journal categories" will show up as an option in your limits. Click on "MEDLINE":

Now your results will include only citations from journals which are indexed in MEDLINE.

Watch the video below for a demonstration of this process.