Four years ago, I wrote about the importance put on reference lists of published works. I explained that citations are the currency of scholarly communication and yet, editorial attention to the reference lists is not necessarily as comprehensive as these lists deserve. Since writing this post, several new tools have become available to further scrutinize the heavily produced and yet editorially ignored citations.

A few weeks ago, my good friend and colleague Bruce Rosenblum send me a message about this 2017 Scholarly Kitchen post. He wrote that four year ago, I asked for a tool that would automatically review and flag reference lists for so-called predatory journals and now my wish has been granted! These kinds of messages don’t come often and so I was excited to learn more. Edifix is an automated reference editing and tagging tool from Inera. Using Cabells Predatory Reports, the Edifix tool will flag references in a paper that appears to come from a problematic journal. From there, further editorial review can commence.

As I documented in this 2017 post, a single journal article inflated with self-citations can turn any paper into an h-index factory. Further, many problematic journals purposefully use titles that are close to real journal titles and nearly indistinguishable once we abbreviate the heck out of them.