Development, Reliability, and Validity of the DIP-DIP Scale for Quick Diagnosis of Predatory Journals

The exponential increase in predatory publications poses a threat to academia. Understanding illegitimate publications has little weight in the academic curriculum. This makes young scholars vulnerable to publishing in fraudulent journals. Moreover, publications in these journals put the researcher’s reputation at risk. Despite the existence of various scales, indexes, and checklists for the evaluation of journals, there is a dearth of tools with proven reliability and validity scores. To bridge this research gap, the authors present the development of an evaluation tool from item generation to validity and reliability, as per the best practice guidelines primer. The objective of this article is to come up with a scale that can quickly identify predatory publications based on digital cues, one that can be taught easily, and one that can draw a quantitative inference. Open registration of this scale was done on Open Science Framework ( https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/JWG97 ).