Is including references of journals with low or no reputation considered bad practice? I am working towards my PhD in a quite specialized area of engineering, at the overlap of two technologies. Because of this, there are not as many publications available in my field compared to other topics. Furthermore, there is no journal specializing in my area of work, and articles are published in a wide range of journals, some of them not the most reputable ones, to put it gently.
I nevertheless have used such references from journals perceived by some as disreputable, just because there are not that many in total to choose from. But often also because the articles aren't of bad quality, in fact, some of the articles in &quot;shady&quot; journals can be of better quality (IMHO) than articles in more reputable publications.
On the other hand, a lot of academics seem to find the idea to publish in a &quot;low quality&quot; journal abhorrent and claim they would never do so, indicating that these journals represent second-class science.
So my question is: is it bad practice to reference journals of low or no reputation or is it OK to do so if

there is a limited overall number of references to chose from?
the quality of the article is high enough? (This would beg the question if I, a lowly PhD student would be able to determine quality in a publication...)
any other reason

I am curious what your opinion on this is.
If you use insights from a publication, you must cite that publication, no matter how low the regard in which you or others hold the venue.
If you're nervous that there's a high risk the insights will be wrong, there are things you can do to reduce that risk:

seek out an independent corroborating source for the same insight (and cite it in addition to the &quot;low quality&quot; source);
check the chain of logic from evidence to conclusions in the &quot;low quality&quot; source step-by-step for yourself (and still cite the source);
if it can be done ethically and affordably, repeat a few of the experiments (if any) reported in the &quot;low quality&quot; source to see if the results are reproducible (and still cite the source).