The problem of the predatory publishing has risen significantly over a decade, impacting the current state of scholarly communication, and attracting the attention of scholars globally. The purpose of this study is to outline the core elements of published documents and obtain the range of areas researched within the field of the predatory publishing. The study also examines and identifies the terminology commonly used in the context of predatory journals. This study performed a coword analysis of 910 documents published on ‘predatory journals’ retrieved from Web of Science which were analysed using VOSviewer and Orange data mining tool. The all keyword analysis shows concepts such as, peer review, open access publishing/standards, research ethics, research integrity, scientific misconduct, research standards, publishing standards, editorial policies. It reflects the topics researchers are discussing in context of predatory journals. The cluster analysis reveals themes related to research evaluation and bibliometrics, highlighting quality and impact of research publications (impact factor, h-index, citations) and indexing systems, research integrity, misconduct, ethics. The term “predatory journal” being the highest occurring ‘authors keyword’ shows the recognition and acceptance of the “predatory” term over other terms used for such journals. The results shows that integration of the thesaurus tool in VOSviewer for co-occurrence network visualization enhances the accuracy and reliability of research analyses. In this study, the network obtained with and without thesaurus tool varies significantly in terms of links, TLS, and number of clusters. The findings of this study offer valuable insights into emerging and latent research themes within this field.