If you want to know whether a journal is what it claims to be, do not start with the website design, the ISSN or the indexing badges. Start with the editorial board.
An editorial board is the most consequential claim a journal makes and the most frequently falsified. Names are copied from other journals' mastheads. Researchers are listed without ever being asked. Real people appear with inflated titles or institutions they left a decade ago. And unlike most claims in publishing, this one is externally checkable by anybody with a browser — which makes it the fastest test available to an author deciding where to submit.
Here is the verification method we run, why each step exists, and how to run the same check on any journal, including ours.
Step 1 — Resolve the person to a persistent identifier
A name and an institution are not an identity. "Dr S. Kumar, Department of Surgery" could be hundreds of people, and affiliations change every time somebody moves job.
The first step is therefore to resolve each board member to an ORCID iD — a persistent identifier the researcher controls and maintains. Once a member is anchored to an ORCID record, everything downstream becomes checkable: their employment history, their publication record, and whether the person on the masthead is the person we think it is.
ORCID matters here for a reason that is easy to miss: the record belongs to the researcher, not to us. We cannot edit it, inflate it or invent it. That is exactly what makes it useful as evidence.
Step 2 — Confirm the affiliation against an institutional registry
An affiliation string on a website is free text. Anyone can type "Harvard Medical School" into a field.
Affiliations are therefore checked against ROR (the Research Organization Registry), which assigns persistent identifiers to research institutions. This resolves three common problems at once: institutions with several legitimate names, departments listed as though they were universities, and institutions that have merged, renamed or closed since the board was assembled.
Where the registry and the listing disagree, the listing is wrong until shown otherwise.
Step 3 — Check the publication record against the subject area
A verified identity at a real institution still does not make somebody an appropriate editor for a surgical oncology journal.
The publication record is checked through OpenAlex and public scholarly profiles, looking at a simple question: does this researcher actually publish in the field the journal covers, and recently enough to be current in it? A distinguished plant geneticist is not qualified to handle a manuscript on laparoscopic technique, and listing them as though they were is a form of misrepresentation even when every biographical detail is accurate.
Step 4 — Record the evidence, not just the conclusion
Each check produces stored evidence — which identifier matched, which registry confirmed the affiliation, what the publication record showed, and how confident the match is — rather than a bare "verified" flag.
This matters more than it sounds. A conclusion without evidence cannot be audited, cannot be re-checked when somebody changes institution, and cannot be defended when challenged. Recording the evidence also makes disagreement productive: if a board member tells us their listing is wrong, we can see precisely which check produced the error.
Verification has three possible outcomes:
| Outcome | What it means | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Confirmed | Identity, affiliation and subject expertise all check out | Listed as stated |
| Corrected | The person is real and appropriate, but a detail was wrong — usually a stale affiliation or title | Record corrected, then listed |
| Not confirmed | The person cannot be resolved, the affiliation does not check out, or the expertise does not match | Should not remain on the masthead |
Where this stands, honestly
This verification programme is running across the full board, and it is not finished. Our journals carry a large number of listed members inherited from years of prior operation, and each one requires an individual, manual check — ORCID, registry, publication record — that cannot responsibly be automated end to end.
We would rather say that plainly than imply a completed audit. A publisher claiming every one of thousands of board members has been personally verified is making a claim you should test, not accept. What we will say is this: the method above is the method, verification is proceeding, corrections are being applied as they are found, and members who cannot be confirmed do not belong on a masthead.
If you are listed on one of our boards and your details are wrong — or you never agreed to be listed at all — write to the editorial office. Correction and removal are both routine requests, and neither requires a justification.
Run the check yourself: four minutes, any journal
You do not need our word for any of this. Here is the check an author can run before submitting anywhere.
- Pick three names at random. Not the Editor-in-Chief, not the first three — scroll to the middle of the list. Fabricated boards are usually padded below the top few real names.
- Search each name in ORCID and Google Scholar. You are looking for a researcher who exists, publishes, and publishes in this field.
- Verify the affiliation on the institution's own website. Not the journal's page — the university or hospital directory. A name that does not appear in their employer's own staff listing is a flag.
- Check the subject fit. Does their published work overlap the journal's scope, or are they a chemist listed on a cardiology journal?
- Email one of them. "I am considering submitting to this journal and see you listed on the editorial board — are you currently an editor there?" Two minutes, and it settles the question completely.
Step 5 is the one almost nobody does, and it is the most informative. Researchers who have been listed without consent generally reply quickly and with feeling.
Why we publish the method
There is an obvious argument against writing this article: it hands readers a checklist they can use against us.
That is the point. A verification method that only works when nobody checks is not a method, it is a claim. The value of ORCID, ROR and OpenAlex is precisely that they are third-party systems we do not control — so if we tell you a board member is verified and they are not, the same tools that let us check let you catch us.
Publishers should be checkable. If more authors ran the five-step check above before submitting, fabricated boards would stop working almost immediately.
Our board listings sit on each journal's editorial board page, and our standards for appointment and conduct are in the Editorial Policies and Research Integrity Statement.