Paste your abstract and up to three candidate journals. We cross-check each one against OpenAlex and DOAJ in real time: whether they publish work like yours, whether they are genuinely indexed as open access, and the objective flags worth checking before you submit. No AI, no cost: two public catalogs answering at once.
Paste your abstract and up to three candidate journals. We cross-check each one against OpenAlex and DOAJ in real time: whether they publish work like yours, whether they are genuinely indexed as open access, and the objective flags worth checking before you submit. No AI, no cost: two public catalogs answering at once.
An open scholarly catalog (successor to Microsoft Academic) indexing over 250 million works and tens of thousands of journals. It supplies the ISSN, publication volume, whether the journal is open access, the publishing organization, and the "topics" — subject areas assigned automatically from the works it publishes — against which your abstract is compared.
A human-curated directory of open-access journals that meet minimum editorial-quality criteria (genuine peer review, an identifiable editorial board, a clear access policy). Being listed in DOAJ is no absolute guarantee, but it does require passing a review; not being listed is not suspicious by itself — subscription journals, very local or very new journals may simply not be there — except when a journal PRESENTS ITSELF as paid open access and still is not listed.
It is a vocabulary overlap, not a language model: significant words are extracted from your abstract and compared against OpenAlex's "topics" (with a small Spanish-English equivalence table for the most common terms in psychology, since OpenAlex topics are always in English). A low fit does not mean the journal will reject your manuscript; it means its usual vocabulary looks little like yours, and deserves a human look before you rule it out or pick it.
None of the four checks (missing from DOAJ with a paid-open-access profile, a name that does not match what was found, unusually low activity or unusually fast growth for its age, and a name resembling a well-known journal) proves anything on its own. They are the same signals found in the Think. Check. Submit. checklist and COPE's principles, automated over public data. The more of these signals pile up on the same journal, the more caution is warranted.
This is what the tool returned when comparing an abstract on social anxiety and social media use in adolescents against two real journals — Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP) — plus a third one that does not exist. Since both sources are living catalogs, the exact figures (works published, citations) will have shifted a little by the time you read this — the pattern is what stays.
Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking: 2,333 works published, 112,222 citations received, h-index of 160. It is subscription-based, so it is not in DOAJ and that triggers no flag. Its areas are "impact of technology on adolescents" and "child development and digital technology": the fit with the abstract came out HIGH, with social, media, community and adolescents among its usual terms. No flags.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: 17,516 works published since 1965, 3,294,010 citations received, h-index of 761. Also subscription-based (APA) and also absent from DOAJ, again with no flag. Its areas are "social and intergroup psychology" and "personality traits": the fit came out MODERATE — social, adolescents and differences match, but not the social-media vocabulary — more centered on general social psychology than on this specific object. No flags.
As a contrast, the same search included "Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Research" — a journal that does not exist. The tool could not find it in OpenAlex and flagged that the name closely resembles the real JPSP: the exact pattern of a phishing solicitation email, which adds or swaps a word in a real journal's name.
Notice the contrast that matters: JPSP has almost thirty times more citations and an h-index five times higher, and even so its fit with this abstract is LOWER than that of a far smaller journal. The tool does not say JPSP is worse; it says that, FOR THIS PARTICULAR ABSTRACT, it publishes less of your kind of work. These are two different questions — "is this a serious journal?" and "does it publish work like mine?" — and this tool mostly answers the second one. Citation authority will not save you from a desk reject for scope mismatch.
This tool verifies the DESTINATION: whether the journal genuinely exists, publishes work on your topic, and does not trigger any warning sign.
Its sister tool does the opposite: it verifies THE AUTHOR, checking whether the references in your own bibliography genuinely exist against eight bibliographic databases.
And if what you are after is help aiming straight at a top-quartile journal, with support choosing it and submitting, there is the
These are objective signals, not a verdict. Before you submit, check directly on the journal's own website: a declared editorial board (with real names and affiliations), the ISSN at the ISSN Portal (portal.issn.org), and if in doubt, consult the Think. Check. Submit. checklist or the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) principles.
No, and be wary of anything that claims to in one click. What it does is show you objective signals — missing from DOAJ, unusual activity, a name resembling another journal — that show up often in questionable journals. The final call, and verifying directly on the journal's own website, is yours.
Because the "topics" OpenAlex uses to describe each journal are always in English, so the vocabulary match works better if your abstract is too. It is not mandatory: it works in Spanish, just with less precision (we cover the most frequent terms in psychology with a small equivalence table, not a full translation).
It depends. If the journal is subscription-based (like JPSP in the example) that is entirely normal: DOAJ only indexes open access. If the journal presents itself as open access and charges an article processing charge (APC) and still is not in DOAJ, that is the single most cited red flag in predatory-journal watchlists — though even that is not definitive proof on its own.
No. Neither OpenAlex nor DOAJ publish Journal Citation Reports or Scimago quartiles, so this tool does not show one — making one up from other data would be exactly the kind of fabricated figure this tool exists to avoid. What it does offer, and a quartile does not, is whether the journal genuinely publishes on your specific topic.