How do I identify predatory and low quality journals? With Beall's List gone, how can I tell if a journal is spam?

I heard about Beall's list several times on this site, but I'm amazed about its significance to some people.

When you start doing research, you need to know which papers are important in your field (your advisor or google scholar will tell you). Then you need to know who is the big shots, and not so big shots in your field. Then you need to know where those guys have published their papers (where your advisor published his/her papers).

Then follow the masters, submit to the conference/journal that they published. If it is a new conference/journal, you need to know some people in the PC members, editors.

If you know none of them, it's not a good idea to submit your paper. In the best case, they are not in your field. Even if you don't know them, you can check if they are from reputable university, if they have well-cited papers to become editors?

Another way is to check 5 papers published by this journal 5 years ago. If none of them has any citations, that journal is spam.

TL;DR: You don't need any list.

As noted in the question, Beall's list once was a method for identifying predatory publishers. However, the list is no more. A recent Publons blog post addressed how to id predatory journals.

Summarizing their post, here are some methods of identifying predatory journals. Most of their methods are more positive than Beall (i.e., they point out good journals rather than highlight predatory journals):

• Check and see if the journal is part of the Directory of Open Access Journals.
• Check the Open Access Journal Quality Indicators
• Use the Think, Check, Submit tools that includes a check list to see if a journal is trusted
• Follow Butler's Checklist
• Examine Publons' list of journals and publishers.

As noted in the comments, some of these lists may have their credibility issues (e.g., Why do open access consortia affiliate themselves with questionable publishers)

Also, you can do your own "smell" test. Note that none of these a perfect. Possible examples include:

• Check out a journal's webpage and publishers. Often predatory journals have bad webpages or webpages that seem slightly off or wrong. However, some predatory journals do have well polished webpages.
• Is the journal associated with a professional society? If so, have you heard of the society? Professional societies tend to host legitimate journals (although there are likely exceptions). However, some predatory journals use the names of societies and academics without their permission (or use fake societies that sound close to real societies).
• Similarly, is the journal associated with a university?
• Lookup the editorial board. Who is on the board? What is their affiliation (e.g., are they grad students and postdocs?)? Also, check the webpages of the board. Do they list the journal? Some journals list people without their permission.

In summary, there is no single method for verifying journals. Some predatory journals go to great lengths to seem real.

Edit note: This answer was updated based upon feedback from StrongBad, Coburn, and Joce.

A non-exhaustive list of red flags:

• They promise an unreasonably fast review cycle, like four weeks or less between initial submission and acceptance notification. While convenient for the authors, it's impossible to guarantee a decent-quality review process in such a tight timeframe.

• They send you unsolicited e-mails. Obviously, sending spam is a strong indicator for a spam journal.

• The articles found in previous editions of the journal seem thematically unrelated or even random.