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 venv from pyproject.toml

  # Install venv from pyproject.toml
  $ uv sync

Minimal example

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