Predatory journal

Imagine you want to draw a beautiful picture and show it to your family and friends. You work hard on your drawing, you color it, and you want to make it perfect. But, before you show it to anyone, you want to make sure someone else looks at it and tells you if it's good or not.

Now imagine you show your drawing to a person who is very mean and doesn’t know anything about art. This person tells you your drawing is the best ever and you should be very proud of it. But this person is actually lying to you because they don't really care about your drawing, they just want to make money from you.

This is how a predatory journal works. It is a website or a magazine that pretends to be a scientific journal, which means it publishes research articles written by scientists. But, unlike real scientific journals, predatory journals don't care about the quality of the articles they publish. They just want to make money and they will accept almost any article regardless of its quality.

So, if a scientist writes a bad article and wants to get it published, the predatory journal will publish it without checking if the information in the article is true or not. This means the article may have false information and can mislead people who read it.

Scientists are like you with your drawing, they want to share their research with the world, but if they show their work to a predatory journal, they may get a fake review that says their work is great, when really, it’s not. This can be bad for science, because it can spread false information and waste other people’s time trying to fix it.

So, just like you shouldn't trust a mean person who pretends to like your drawing, scientists shouldn't trust predatory journals that pretend to be real scientific journals. Instead, they should submit their articles to trusted, reputable journals, which will check if the article is correct and useful before publishing it.