Tru

Inspiration

Predatory journals are the scientific equivalent of fake news. They fast track the publishing of research articles through low editorial standards and non-rigorous science. These non-peer reviewed articles are damaging for researchers, the open access scientific community, and scientists looking to publish their work.

What it does

Our solution is a browser extension that works with google chrome. The user receives a pop-up warning when they are viewing an article that comes from a potentially predatory journal.

How we built it

We used python to extract journal names from two separate lists of predatory journals: Beall's list (https://beallslist.weebly.com/) and Scholarly Open Access (https://web.archive.org/web/20170111172309/https://scholarlyoa.com/individual-journals/)

Challenges we ran into

Integrating Javascript into an HTML extension, formatting the predatory journal names to be searchable.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Incorporating JQuery into a google chrome extension to allow real time search of our predatory journal database.

What we learned

We had very little previous experience with Javascript and learned how to search google for coding solutions. This was also our first experience using Github for a group coding project.

What's next for Tru

Better user interface that provides animated warnings. Machine learning integration to suggest similar articles for the user that aren't from predatory journals.