rt-venue-integrity

Venue Integrity Check (rt-venue-integrity)

The 743 venues in shared-resources/journal-selection/venue-index.tsv were each curated into this repository from their own published guidance, so a venue being in the index is at least evidence that someone looked. The moment an author steps outside it — and journal-match.md's coverage-honesty rule requires saying so rather than forcing a poor fit — this repository has nothing to offer, and that is exactly the moment the risk appears: a solicitation email, a plausible-looking title, an APC, and a paper that becomes uncitable and cannot be resubmitted elsewhere.

This is the check to run before that submission.

First: is it actually outside the index?

python3 tools/match_venues.py --title "<the venue's name>" --top 5
grep -i "<name fragment>" shared-resources/journal-selection/venue-index.tsv

Venues appear under several names, and a Chinese journal's English title or an acronym's expansion often looks unfamiliar when the venue is in fact covered in depth. If it is in the index, stop — the pack answers the question better than this checklist does, and the checks below are for venues nobody here has vetted.

When to trigger

• The target venue is not in venue-index.tsv and not in a breadth bundle.
• The invitation arrived unsolicited, by email, praising the author's "esteemed work".
• A degree, tenure or funding rule requires a specific index (SSCI / SCIE / Scopus / CSSCI / Peking University Core), and the venue's claim to it has not been verified.
• The venue's name closely resembles a well-known journal's.
• An APC is quoted and the author is deciding whether to pay it.

The protocol

Verify each item against the source named, at the time of asking. Record the source and the date. A claim on the journal's own website is not verification of that claim.

Check	Verify against	A finding worth stopping for
Indexing claim (SSCI/SCIE/ESCI)	Clarivate Master Journal List search	listed nowhere, or listed only in ESCI while the site claims SCIE
Indexing claim (Scopus)	Elsevier Scopus source list (title + ISSN)	absent, or marked discontinued
Open-access legitimacy	DOAJ entry	absent, or removed
Chinese index claim	the current CSSCI / Peking University Core catalogue for the stated period	claimed for a period it was not listed
Delisting history	the index's own discontinued-titles list	delisted, and when
ISSN and title	the ISSN Portal	ISSN belongs to a different title
Publisher identity	publisher's site, membership of COPE / OASPA / STM	no traceable publisher, or a membership that cannot be confirmed
Editorial board	spot-check three named editors at their stated institutions	editors who do not list the role, or cannot be found
Fees	the journal's own author guidelines	fee disclosed only after acceptance
Peer review	the stated policy, and the promised timeline	review promised in days; "guaranteed" acceptance
Retractions	Retraction Watch database, PubPeer for the field	a pattern, not a single retraction

Five to ten minutes of checking; the failure it prevents is measured in years.

What this skill will not do

It ships no list of predatory journals and applies no label. Those lists are contested, go stale, and calling a named journal predatory is a factual claim about a real publisher that this repository is not in a position to make. The output is a table of checks, each with a source and a date, and the author draws the conclusion.

Report a check as verified, failed, or could not verify — and treat "could not verify" as its own answer, not as a soft pass.

Output format

【Venue】name · publisher · ISSN
【Checks】
  indexing (SSCI)    verified / failed / could not verify — source, date
  indexing (Scopus)  …
  publisher          …
  editorial board    …
  fees               …
  retractions        …
【Unresolved】what could not be verified, and what would resolve it
【What this means for the requirement】whether the degree/tenure index rule is met
【Author's decision】stated as a decision for the author, with the risks named

Hard rules

1. Name the source and the date for every check. An unsourced check is not a check.
2. Never assert that a journal is predatory, fraudulent or fake. Report what each primary source says or does not say.
3. "Could not verify" is a finding, and for an unfamiliar venue asking for money it is a serious one. Do not round it up to "probably fine".
4. An indexing requirement is checked against the index, not the journal. A journal's own claim to be indexed is the thing under test.
5. If the venue is in venue-index.tsv, this skill is not needed — say so and hand back to rt-journal-match.

Anti-patterns

• Judging a journal by its APC. Many reputable open-access journals charge; many predatory ones are cheap.
• Treating an unfamiliar name as suspect. Small national and specialist journals are legitimate and often the right home for a paper.
• Running the check after submission. Withdrawal is not always possible, and simultaneous submission is misconduct.

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The escape hatch for rt-journal-match's coverage-honesty rule: when the right venue is outside the index, this is what to do instead of forcing a fit. Part of Research-Toolkit-Skills.