Beware predatory publications

I've seen some students on here talk about how they have published "research" and have still gotten rejected from schools. While this might not be the only reason for rejection, please take note of what journals you're actually publishing in. Publishing in predatory journals will tarnish your credibility, not just for college applications but for any future research you do even into your PhD. If a journal promises "rapid publication" or can publish your paper in days/weeks then it probably is not legitimate. Some journals publish pre-prints which go through no peer review and basically publishes junk science. The peer review step is a long and onerous but extremely important step for publishing sound research. You can tell if a journal is predatory by a few red flags: wild fonts on the homepage of the website, grammatical errors, look up the address on Google earth (one predatory journal I found had their "address" as someone's house in Maryland), look up the editorial board (sometimes they will list dead researchers in their board). You can check if it is indexed in Scopus, if it is not that is a red flag but does not necessarily mean it is predatory. Websites you can check for your journal are on DOAJ, Journal Citation Reports, Cabell's Scholarly Articles, and Ulrich's Gloab Series Directory.