Misleading Metrics

Fake and questionable scores

Misleading metrics

Misleading metrics imitate the language of legitimate journal evaluation. They may look scientific, but they often lack transparent methodology, independent governance, or recognized use by libraries and indexing services.

Maintained by the Beallslists.com editorial review team · Last reviewed: June 19, 2026

Why metrics matter

Authors often use metrics to decide where to submit. Questionable publishers know this and may display invented impact factors, global indexes, certificates, badges, or scores that are not recognized by established databases.

A real journal metric should be traceable to an identifiable organization with a public methodology, clear coverage criteria, and a way to verify the exact journal title and ISSN.

Last updated: November 3, 2016

Update

Last updated: January 17, 2019

Criteria for Determining Misleading Metrics

  1. The website for the metric is nontransparent and provides little information about itself such as location, management team and its experience, other company information, and the like.
  2. The company charges journals for inclusion in the list.
  3. The values (scores) for most or all of the journals on the list increase each year.
  4. The company uses Google Scholar as its database for calculating metrics (Google Scholar does not screen for quality and indexes predatory journals).
  5. The metric uses the term “impact factor” in its name.
  6. The methodology for calculating the value is contrived, unscientific, or unoriginal.
  7. The company exists solely for the purpose of earning money from questionable journals that use the gold open-access model. The company charges the journals and assigns them a value, and then the journals use the number to help increase article submissions and therefore revenue. Alternatively, the company exists as a front for an existing publisher and assigns values to that publisher’s journals.

Useful external references

These links are included because they are practical, public starting points for researchers. They should be used alongside local institutional policies and the current evidence for a specific journal or publisher.

Related researcher resources