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I had recently submitted my paper to this journal on the advise of my guide and quite fortunately, I received an email a few days back saying that the paper had been accepted for publication. So before I pay the requisite fee of $165 (what is your opinion? is this too much?) I just wanted to know how good the journal was (the website says it has an impact factor of 2.13) and how much value such a publication will have. Would be really nice if someone could guide me on this. (This would be my first publication and I'm an undergraduate student)

This is the journal website link -> http://www.ijpam.eu/

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    IJPAM is published by Academic Publications Ltd which is on Beall's list of potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers – StrongBad Jul 18 '13 at 12:57
  • @DanielE.Shub much thanks for that. I guess I should immediately withdraw the article then. – ConfusedUndergraduate Jul 18 '13 at 13:07
  • May I ask how long it took for you to receive the answer? If acceptance is very fast, this is an indicator (not a proof) that the journal does not take peer review seriously. In a good journal, each review cycle tends to take a couple of weeks at least. Also, initial acceptance after the first (apparent) review round is very uncommon in all fields that I know. – bers Aug 15 '16 at 21:19
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    Also see How can I tell whether a mathematics journal seems reputable? – ff524♦ Aug 16 '16 at 2:47
  • I happened to come across an article in this journal just now, and for this particular journal this to me is the easiest and rather definitive test (cf @ff524's link): it is not indexed by Mathematical Reviews (MathSciNet), though it was until 2011 (and even then, many of the articles were only indexed and not reviewed), which means it is not considered a quality math journal. – Kimball Aug 7 '18 at 22:19
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To try to make this answer generalizable, here's how one can investigate in general:

The first thing to do is to ask more experienced researchers for their opinions, which is exactly what you've done here. But you may run into the problem that you can't find people who know the journal. For example, I don't recall having heard of IJPAM before, but it's not clear what that means. IJPAM is certainly not a famous or prestigious journal, but there are a lot of journals out there and nobody has heard of all of them.

Beall's list is a list of "potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers." The publisher of IJPAM (Academic Publications, Ltd.) appears on this list, which is a bad sign. You have to decide how to interpret it - maybe Beall has made a mistake, or maybe your criteria are different from his - but it's an important sign that you should investigate further.

You can then take a look at the actual papers and see what you think of them (or ask faculty members at your university). In the case of IJPAM, I found it quite worrisome. I looked at the most recent issue and found several papers that don't look like research papers at all: Sudoko: the new smash hit puzzle game and Odd and even number cultures. This suggests IJPAM will publish nearly anything. If you've written a research paper, having it appear next to papers with no research content would look bad, so I recommend against publishing in IJPAM.

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  • Thanks a ton for that. I guess I have to withdraw my article from them. And to do so, would sending an email to the editor suffice? Please guide me on this. And also, how do you think one can actually zero in on a journal to publish any work? – ConfusedUndergraduate Jul 18 '13 at 13:16
  • Yup, an email to the editor should suffice. – Anonymous Mathematician Jul 18 '13 at 13:19
  • @AnonymousMathematician those are some eye-opening examples of poor scholarship – StrongBad Jul 18 '13 at 13:41

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