Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A university library holds an institutional subscription to Cabells Predatory Reports; a research office or a faculty member preparing a submission looks up an unfamiliar journal by name or ISSN and sees not just a yes/no flag but which specific criteria it triggered (for example, false claims of an impact factor, or an editorial board that cannot be verified).
- Is an instance
A researcher receives an unsolicited email inviting a submission with an unusually fast promised turnaround and an upfront fee; before submitting, their institution's library or research-integrity office checks the journal against Cabells Predatory Reports as one input alongside other checks (e.g. the guide on how to identify predatory journals and publishers).
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A journal that does not appear in Cabells Predatory Reports is not thereby confirmed legitimate — absence can mean the journal has genuinely not been flagged, or simply that Cabells' reviewers have not yet evaluated it; a positive listing in Cabells Journalytics (a separate, distinct Cabells product for journals it has verified as reputable) is a stronger positive signal than a mere absence from Predatory Reports.
- Not an instance
Beall's List is not Cabells Predatory Reports and the two should not be cited interchangeably: Beall's List is a free, single-author, discontinued-since-2017 blog post; Predatory Reports is a paid, multi-reviewer, actively updated commercial database run by a different organization entirely.
Editorial commentary
Cabells Predatory Reports is a paid subscription database, published by the scholarly-analytics company Cabells, that catalogs academic journals its review team has determined exhibit deceptive or predatory editorial and publishing practices. Launched in 2017 and renamed from “Cabells’ Blacklist” to “Predatory Reports” in June 2020, it is generally regarded as the closest thing to a continuously updated successor to Beall’s List, which stopped being updated when Jeffrey Beall took his site down in January 2017. For general guidance on evaluating a specific journal, see CASRAI’s guide on How to Identify Predatory Journals and Publishers; this entry covers the Cabells product specifically.
How it differs from Beall’s List
The distinction matters because the two are often cited as if interchangeable, and they are not:
- Active vs. frozen. Predatory Reports is updated on an ongoing basis — journals are added (and the evaluation criteria themselves have been revised more than once) continuously. Beall’s List has not been updated since January 2017 and is now a historical snapshot.
- Paid vs. free. Predatory Reports is a commercial subscription product, typically licensed at the institutional level. Beall’s List was published free on a personal blog.
- Documented criteria vs. one reviewer’s judgment. Predatory Reports evaluates journals against a published, versioned checklist of specific behavioral indicators. Beall’s List reflected the evolving judgment of a single librarian applying his own published criteria, without a comparable formal versioned instrument.
- Organizational backing. Predatory Reports is maintained by a company with a review team; Beall’s List was the work of one person.
Methodology
Cabells evaluates journals against a structured set of behavioral indicators grouped by category (for example, peer-review integrity, editorial-board verifiability, indexing and impact-factor claims, and business/fee-disclosure practices) and by severity. The published criteria have been revised over time as new evasion tactics emerge — version 1.0, at the product’s 2017 launch, listed 64 criteria; version 1.1, published in 2019, expanded this to 74. A journal is added to Predatory Reports when Cabells’ reviewers determine it meets enough of these indicators, with the specific triggering criteria disclosed to subscribers alongside the listing, rather than a bare inclusion/exclusion flag.
Access model
Predatory Reports is not freely browsable. It is licensed on a subscription basis, most commonly by a university or research-institution library, and is then typically made available to affiliated researchers, editors, and research-administration staff through that institutional subscription, either as a standalone product or bundled with Cabells’ companion Journalytics subscription. Researchers without institutional access generally reach it, if at all, through their library’s subscription databases page rather than a public search.
Journalytics: the companion “whitelist” product
Cabells separately publishes Journalytics, a parallel database of journals Cabells has reviewed and verified as legitimate, including metrics such as acceptance rates and the share of invited versus unsolicited articles. Where Predatory Reports functions as a negative list (flagging journals with documented predatory indicators), Journalytics functions as a positive, whitelist-style directory of vetted, reputable titles. The two are distinct products, though institutions sometimes subscribe to both together.
Limitations
As with any single evaluative source, Predatory Reports is not treated as infallible even by researchers who use it regularly. Published critiques of the criteria and methodology have raised concerns including inconsistent weighting across indicators, listings that are not regularly reassessed after initial inclusion, and disagreement over specific edge-case journals — the kind of methodological scrutiny normal for any evaluative database, and a reason CASRAI’s broader guide on identifying predatory journals recommends checking a journal against multiple signals (indexing in recognized databases, editorial board verifiability, transparent fee disclosure) rather than relying on any single list, free or paid.
Related terms
- Beall’s List — the discontinued free precursor Predatory Reports is often compared to.
- Predatory journal — the underlying concept both tools attempt to identify.
- How to Identify Predatory Journals and Publishers — CASRAI’s broader evaluation guide.
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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