Predatory Battle

MIT License

This is a little script in python which takes as input a bibtex/biblatex file and tries to recognize predatory publications.

It maintains a list of predatory sources from:

• https://predatoryjournals.com/journals/
• https://beallslist.weebly.com/
• https://beallslist.weebly.com/standalone-journals.html
• https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Y_Sza4rPDkf-NNX9kwiErGrKeNTM75md9B63A_gVpaQ/
• https://libguides.caltech.edu/c.php?g=512665&p=3503029

It checks if journals, books or conferences are present in such lists.

WARNING! The script is highly imprecise and should be used as a helper to human work. You should carefully check suggestions coming from the script!

Installation

• Download the repository
• Install pdftotext command -- very likely, it is already installed
• Install the following modules with your package manager or (not recommended) with pip: pip3 install --upgrade fuzzywuzzy latexcodec requests nltk

Usage

• Download the repository
• Enter in the directory: cd predatory-battle
• Launch the script with a bibtex/biblatex file as argument: python3 check_references.py bibtex_file.bib

TODO

• Improve approximate search (at now it doesn't check the order of words)
• Better output (at now it output the cleaned text, not the original one)
• Add import format (EndNote, Text, ...)
• Add import from PDF files (maybe using refextract module)