Paste an ISSN. The page fetches publication metadata from OpenAlex and renders country, institution, author, and Problematic Paper Screener flag trends — all in your browser.
journal-trends is a small, free, open-data tool that visualises publication-trend statistics for any academic journal indexed in OpenAlex. Paste an ISSN and the page fetches the journal's publication metadata from OpenAlex and renders interactive country, institution, author, and Problematic-Paper-Screener (PPS) flag trends.
?issn=<issn> in the
URL — bookmark or share the link.
Publication data — OpenAlex
Priem, J., Piwowar, H., & Orr, R. (2022). OpenAlex:
A fully-open index of scholarly works, authors, venues, institutions,
and concepts. ArXiv.
arxiv.org/abs/2205.01833
Problematic-paper flags — The Problematic Paper Screener
Cabanac, G., Labbé, C., & Magazinov, A. (2022).
The 'Problematic Paper Screener' automatically selects suspect
publications for post-publication (re)assessment. arXiv.
arxiv.org/abs/2210.04895
This site is based on third-party data — primarily OpenAlex, a community-maintained open dataset that may contain inaccuracies, omissions, or out-of-date records — and on the Problematic Paper Screener, whose flags are best-effort indicators of suspect publications. A flag is not proof of misconduct, and the absence of a flag is not proof of correctness. The information shown here is provided for research and educational purposes only. We make no warranty as to its accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any purpose, and accept no responsibility or liability for any decisions or conclusions drawn from the information presented.
This is an open-source project led by India Research Watch (IRW) and its founder Achal Agrawal, part of Nature's 10 — the list of people who impacted science the most in 2025. It builds on the expertise of the sleuth community in reading research-integrity signals in journals.
Choosing where to publish is one of the most consequential decisions in academic research. Journal Trends helps you analyze journal trends and visualize any abnormal patterns. Look for healthy contributor diversity, steady (not exploding) growth, and a low PPS flag rate.
Journal Trends is a free, no-signup tool that pulls publication metadata directly from OpenAlex and renders it as interactive charts in your browser. There's no paywall or trial. Every chart can be downloaded as a PNG or shared via a journal-specific URL. There is no catch — it's a community-driven initiative.
Paste the journal's ISSN into the search box at the top of this page. The tool fetches the journal's papers from OpenAlex (or uses the backend cache if another visitor has already loaded it) and renders four tabs: Country trends, Institution trends, Author trends, and Problematic Paper Screener (PPS) flag breakdowns.
The Problematic Paper Screener is a community-maintained project by Cabanac, Labbé and Magazinov (2022) that automatically flags suspect publications using detectors like tortured phrases, citejacking, retraction signals, and feet of clay (clayFeet). Journal Trends overlays PPS flags onto each journal's profile so you can see flag rates over time, the detector mix, and which countries and institutions account for the flagged work.
Journal Trends doesn't label journals as "predatory" — the term is contested. But it surfaces three signals that often correlate with predatory practices: a huge increase in publication volume, heavy concentration of papers from a few countries, institutions or authors, and elevated Problematic Paper Screener flag rates. You can interpret the data and reach your own conclusions.
Each journal page includes a Country trends tab showing year-on-year publication counts and percentages by country, using fractional counting for multi-country papers (each paper splits credit equally between authors' countries). Click any country in the legend to pin its highlight across all charts and the tooltip.
Journal Trends is free, open-data, and runs entirely in your browser. It uses OpenAlex (a fully-open scholarly index of 250M+ works) and the Problematic Paper Screener. It is not a replacement for commercial bibliometric databases, but a free complementary tool focused on country, institution and author trends and on integrity signals. Its sole purpose is to help researchers be more informed while choosing journals.
Yes. Every loaded journal updates the URL to
?issn=<issn>. Bookmark or share that URL —
opening it auto-loads the same view. Each chart card also has a
Share button (top-right) that lets you post
directly to LinkedIn, X (Twitter), or save the chart image for
Instagram.