THE FSTA® PRODUCTION PROCESS.

The FSTA® database is closely managed by a team of expert scientists, who rigorously vet additions and sources for value and relevance to the sciences of food and health.

Many databases skip this vetting procedure or rely on automated systems.

One recent study concluded that 8,000 predatory journals collectively publish 420,000 papers every year, nearly a fifth of the scientific community's annual output of 2.5 million papers."

(Naomi Oreskes, Predatory Journals That Publish Shoddy Research Put People’s Lives at Risk, Scientific American)

We conduct a thorough evaluation of each journal and resource against a checklist of criteria relating to potentially predatory or unethical publishing practices.

Our checklist covers 60 measures across several diverse areas, including:

• the journal’s name
• ISSN
• integrity, based on the authorship and scope of the articles
• geographical diversity of the editorial board and origin of the journal in relation to claims of being an international/national journal
• integrity and provision of editorial board member details
• offers of unusually rapid publication/peer review
• provision of details regarding the journal’s peer review policy
• offers for certain services or involvement with the journal in exchange for extra fees
• provision and integrity of details about the publisher
• amount, start dates and scope of other journals on the publisher platform
• false claims of indexing in well-known databases
• missing issues/articles in the journal’s archive
• availability of articles in journals claiming to be open access
• details of publication fees, including offers of discounts, special rates and reduced fees, as well as time limits placed on prices
• clarity of the scope of the journal, including breadth of areas covered and justification for the inclusion of unrelated disciplines
• unjustified claims by the journal of importance or establishment in the field
• provision of statements of conduct for editors or reviewers
• use of misleading metrics
• numbers of self-citations
• maintenance of the journal website
  
  

You can be confident that the content on FSTA® is relevant to your field and meets high standards of scientific validity and rigour. That’s because our food experts identify and exclude publishers and journals that may be using predatory practices and publishing fake science.

You can check if a journal is indexed in FSTA® easily by clicking the link below;

Search the FSTA® Journal Database | IFIS

In addition, every abstract in our database is carefully indexed against the world’s most comprehensive subject-specific food and beverage thesaurus, unique to FSTA®.

This has 16,000 terms and is the most complete thesaurus of food-specific terms that exists.

When you are doing literature by discovery, it is easy to make a mistake. Failures begin right at the start. Avoid errors get the best start possible with FSTA®.

(See our video below about how to avoid predatory journals).