Detecting a network of hijacked journals by its archive
11 Detecting a network of hijacked journals by its archive
Anna Abalkina
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich [email protected]
Abstract
The detection of hijacked journals is typically possible after some period of a clone website’s operation. This study describes a method to detect hijacked journals based on the analysis of the archives of clone journals. This approach is most effective in discovering a network of hijacked journals that have the same organizer(s). Analysis of the archives of clone journals allowed to detect 62 URLs of hijacked journals. It also provided the possibility to predict two clone websites before they became operational. This study shows that most detected hijacked journals represent a network of clone journals organized by one or several fraudulent individuals. The information and content of nine legitimate journals were compromised in international and national scientometric databases. .
Key words: clone journals, hijacked journals, fraudulent publishers, academic ethics, fraud detection, network
Acknowledgments . The author would like to acknowledge the assistance of Natalia Toganova and Evgeny Enikeev in writing the scripts.
Conflict of interests
The author has no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.
Introduction and background
Clone journals became another manifestation of unscrupulous publishers. The first described case dates back to 2011 (Jalalian and Dadkhah 2015). Since then, hundreds of journals have been hijacked . Hijacked journals mimic peer-reviewed journals (Lukić 2014; Bohannon 2015; Jalalian and Dadkhah 2015). They copy the ISSN and title of a legitimate journal to cheat potential clients (Dadkhah et al. 2016a) and provide a fake inflated impact factor (Jalalian and Mahboobi 2013; Jalalian 2015, Samuel and Aranha 2018). These journals target those researchers who are required to publish in journals indexed in international databases (Jalalian and Mahboobi 2014) such as Scopus or the Web of Science or those included in white lists, e.g., the UGC-CARE Approved list, which is applied in India. Fraudulent publishers could use several methods to hijack a journal: register an expired domain (Jalalian and Dadkhah 2015, Memon 2019), hack the site of an authentic journal and register an alternative domain (Abalkina 2020a), or create a clone journal. Some fake clone journals cheat international databases by providing homepage links to fraudulent sites. Such cases were described by Jalalian and Dadkhah (2015) and Bohannon (2015) when some cyber links in Clarivate Master’s journal list were directed to hijacked journals. Some hijackers were able to index the content of a clone journal in international databases (Abalkina 2020a; Al-Amr 2020). The sophistication of cyber fraud and the frequency of successful attempts at fraud in international scientometric databases create a challenge for the international scientific community. Despite the fact that researchers, activists, and some institutions, such as the University Grant Commission in India, create lists of clone journals, there are no systematic checks of journal hijacking. In addition, systematic checks are hardly possible since the creation of a clone journal is an easy enterprise and the registration of the domain can be totally anonymous. Moreover, in most cases, it is possible to detect hijackers only after they use Hijacked journals are listed on the following websites: https://beallslist.net/hijacked-journals/, https://predatoryjournals.com/hijacked/, and https://ugccare.unipune.ac.in/Apps1/User/Web/CloneJournals aggressive marketing and publishing. This creates a challenge to control hijackers and prevent the expansion of such a phenomenon in publishing. Hijacked journals and fraudulent publishers exploit the open access (OA) model and receive a fee for the publication of an article. Clone journals offer fast publication with no peer review. Clone journals menace academic integrity by publishing articles with no peer review, bias international database indexes, and become the repository of low-quality papers for a short period of time because clone websites of journals are not available after some period of time (Dadkhah et al. 2016b). The interest in the study of hijacked journals was increased by the discovery of several clone journals in 2020. The fraudulent publishers hacked the site of the Talent Development and Excellence journal and cloned it. They also succeeded in indexing nearly 500 articles in Scopus in 2020 (Abalkina 2020a), which were later excluded after letters by the legitimate publishers. Unauthentic content of the Transylvanian Review also ended up in Scopus and later was deleted from the database (Al-Amr 2020). Another case was described on social media by the Russian researcher Eugene Osin. He found his paper cited in a clone of a German journal
Waffen- und Kostümkunde . This discovery was possible because the article written by Russian scholars in the clone journal that cited Osin’s paper was indexed in the Russian scientometric database eLibrary. The inspection of the low-quality clone website of a German journal raised several questions. First, for how long was this website working? Second, why did the archive section of the journal contained issues since 2014, despite their periodicity being different (biannual vs annual issues)? The check of the domain using the Whois service showed that the website was updated on January 8, 2020 (the registration date is not available). This approach was also used by Bohannon (2015) who detected hijacked journals using the recent registration of the sites and was advised by Asadi et al. (2016) to distinguish legitimate publishers and clone journals. If the clone journal presumably started its activity in 2020, what about the archive content of the previous five to six years? The hypothesis was that content should be as fake as the journal itself. The expectation was to find articles that had already been published in other journals. The alternative hypothesis was that those naïve authors who were cheated published their original articles. Ten authors whose articles were found in the archive of the clone journal Waffen- und Kostumkunde were contacted. Only two answered, and they confirmed that they have never submitted a paper to the journal. Papers of these scholars were duplicated and published in the archive of the hijacked journal. This proved that the hypothesis of fake content was correct. A manual Google search of the title of the articles and authors allowed to detect several other clone journals that reused the same papers for their archive sections. Dadkhah et al. (2016b) demonstrated evidence of the circulation of the same texts between hijacked and predatory journals. The articles in hijacked journals are not indexed, and text similarities cannot be detected by anti-plagiarism software (Dadkhah et al. 2016b). Hijacked journals accept articles without peer review, and it is very likely that they do not check texts for the presence of plagiarism/self-plagiarism. The migration of text similarities was also demonstrated by Russian Dissernet, which detected the network of dissertation mills and circulation of identical texts without a proper citation between numerous PhD theses (Abalkina 2020b). PhD theses defended in dissertation mills were reused and thus became a predictor of other dishonest dissertations. Based on this evidence, the content of hijacked journals can be a predictor of other fraudulent journals, especially if they belong to the same network. In such fraudulent mills, hijacked journal text can only show the visibility of a scientific article and must comply with formal criteria, such as having a title, abstract, content and bibliography. I will study whether the archives of hijacked journals can be used to predict other hijacked journals, especially from the same network. To conduct the analysis, I need to search the titles and authors of the detected hijacked journals to find other hijacked journals from the network. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The next section overviews the literature on the economic theory of crime, the circulation of the text similarities and the determinants to publish in low-quality journals. Section three presents the argument. Section four discusses the methods. Section five reports the results of the study. Section six provides the discussion. Section seven concludes.
Literature review
In my study, I use insights and evidence from several literature streams. First, I examine the literature on the economic theory of crime and rational behavior of criminals, which depends on the costs and benefits of fraud. Second, I examine the determinants of publishing in low-quality journals. Third, I review the research on academic misconduct and plagiarism with a focus on the recycling of texts in predatory or hijacked journals. In this study, the terms ‘text recycling’ and ‘recycled content’ will be used in their broad senses to refer to both plagiarism and self-plagiarism. According to the economic theory of crime criminals act rationally, their criminal behavior depends on the benefits of fraudulent behavior and the costs of the actions together with the probability of being caught and the severity of punishment (Becker 1968, Garoupa 2014). The benefits of fraudulent actions include income from the fraudulent act. Although the costs of fraudulent actions include the costs of organizing the fraudulent action and the costs of punishment, moral values and psychological factors are also considered. According to the economic theory of crime, fraud will take place if the benefits exceed the costs. One of the consequences of this economic theory of crime suggests that criminals would minimize their costs. Hijacked journals represent a type of cybercrime. Cybercriminals cheat the scholars who wish to publish articles in journals included in different white lists. As the average time of such fraud is not long due to possible detection of a clone journal, hijackers will try to reduce the costs and maximize the benefits. The success of fraud also depends on the demand of scholars for publications. Scholars are required to publish papers in order to meet the requirements to accomplish PhD theses, career promotions or grant applications (De Bond and Miller 2005; Dyke 2019; Huang 2020). Publication pressure increases the probability of cheating by scholars due to the increased benefits of fraudulent behavior. Publish or perish pressure has been found to be a factor that increases the probability of academic misconduct by scholars (Martinson et al. 2005; Necker 2014; Fanelli et al.2015; Hopp and Hoover 2017; Burton et al. 2020). The evidence also shows that poor performers would increase cheating under competitive pressure (Schwieren and Weichselbaumer 2010; Cartwright and Menezes 2014). Hijacked journals exploit this publish or perish culture in order to attract and cheat scholars who wish to publish articles in order to meet the requirements for publications. There are four main groups of factors why scholars choose to publish in low-quality journals that offer the fast publication of a paper. The first group of factors is connected with the academic requirements for publications, e.g., to apply for a job or to obtain academic promotion (Seethapathy et al. 2016; Demir 2018; Cortegiani et al. 2020), to pass regular academic attestation (Bagues et al. 2019), to fulfil the requirements of publications for a PhD degree (Seethapathy et al. 2016; Patwardhan 2019), and to obtain a financial bonus for a publication (Demir 2018). The second group of factors explains the publication in low-quality journals by young or unexperienced researchers who may be unaware of the quality of the journals and submit papers to them (Kurt 2018). The third group is related to the quality of the research itself. There is also evidence that some researchers are unable to provide high-quality research that is required for prestigious journals (Demir 2018). Poor proficiency in English is also a reason that researchers do not submit papers to high-quality journals (Kurt 2018). The last group is connected with social or religious identity. Researchers belonging to developing counties or to certain religions do not believe that their papers would be treated equally or even considered when submitted to prestigious journals (Kurt 2018). Predatory and hijacked journals are prone to academic misconduct and dishonesty. They accept the publication of papers containing serious errors (Bohannon 2013), pseudoscientific ideas (RAS 2020) or plagiarism. Owens and Nicoll (2019) examined the content of three predatory nursing journals in order to detect plagiarism or duplication of papers. They studied 296 articles, and in 100 of them (68%), they found exact or near exact text similarities. Abad-García (2019) also provides evidence from fraudulent scholars who copied the articles of other authors and published them under their own names in predatory journals. I have already mentioned that there is evidence of similar text circulation between predatory and hijacked journals (Dadkhah et al. 2016b). These observations provide further support for the hypothesis that low-quality journals are predisposed to plagiarism and academic dishonesty. There is currently considerable concern about predatory and hijacked journals that provide poor quality or no peer review and do not check enough or any of the texts for plagiarism. This creates a challenge for academic integrity. Furthermore, we still do not know enough about plagiarism in journals because the knowledge on text similarities depends directly on systematic checks for plagiarism, which are not done yet by the scientific community due to obvious time- and resource-consuming procedures and challenges in detecting text similarities (Weber-Wulff 2019). This creates opportunities for poor-quality journals and hijacked journals to develop their business with impunity and without regard to academic integrity.
Argument
The business of hijacked journals consists of mimicking an original journal, including copying the name, the ISSN, and the journal's reputation, as well as its indexes in international databases. Hijacked journals collect fees for fast publication without peer review. The amount of the fee depends on the reputation of the original journal and on the quality of the hack. According to the evidence of victims, the fees could reach up to $1000 for a paper in a clone journal that was able to index the article in the Scopus database. According to the economic theory of crime, fraudulent publishers maximize the utility function given the probability that the fraud is detected and punished. Journal hijacking cybercrimes have a very low risk of punishment. The probability of detection of the owners of such fraudulent businesses is not high. Most of the domains that host hijacked journals are anonymous according to the Whois service data. Using the economic theory of crime approach, fraudulent publishers should minimize the costs of detecting the fake status of the journal. Fraudulent publishers tend to mimic all formal criteria by copying the ISSN and title of a journal, which are essential parts of the business. Some hijackers change some words in the title of the journal to avoid legal accusations of the theft of the journal title. In many cases, the words “the Journal of” or “Research journal of” are added (Abalkina 2020a). One of the important features of a reputable journal is its archive. A newly created clone journal has four alternatives in this case: (a) to leave empty content, (b) to use the content of an authentic journal, (c) to create original content of the journal, and (d) to create recycled content. Hijacked journals normally do not copy the content of authentic journals (with some exceptions). This is connected with the fact that the latter publishes papers on specific subareas of research and/or in native languages. Many hijacked journals position themselves as multidisciplinary and publish articles mostly in English. That is why it is not promising to use the original content. There are also legal considerations to copying papers from authentic journals. It is not possible to do without the permission of a legitimate journal (Sanderson 2010). Furthermore, the content of a reputable journal can be tracked, and the hijacked journal can be easily detected. The content of the journal and the continuity of publishing are the factors that can attract potential clients by creating an illusion of an authentic journal with archive issues. In this case, leaving the content blank will not attract potential clients because they most likely will not consider an empty journal as an authentic journal (Dony 2020). In this case, two alternatives are left for fraudulent publishers: to create original content or to use recycled texts. Fraudulent journals will not create original content due to its high costs and will use recycled text with higher probability. Clone journals would use the less expensive option to create the content. Fraudulent publishers can take the text from hijacked or predatory publishers but not legitimate journals because the first two are not well known to readers, and it is more difficult for authentic authors or readers to detect fraud. The recent finding by Björk et al. (2020) showed that 56% of the articles in predatory journals receive zero citations while only 9% of the articles indexed in international databases are not cited, e.g., papers from predatory journals are less visible to the audience. The content from hijacked journals also has limited visibility. Moreover, due to the short operating period of hijackers, the content can be lost; thus, the articles published in hijacked journals can be lost for the scientific community (Dadkhah and Borchardt 2016; Van Zundert and Klein 2019), and the recycling of such content cannot be detected after some period of time. In this case, the archive of a newly created clone journal is replenished by texts from hijacked or predatory journals created via text recycling. The evidence from Russian plagiarised PhD theses shows that within a dissertation mill each text of the thesis can be reused plenty of times, and thus other dishonest PhD holders can be detected (Abalkina 2020b). By searching the content of the journal (titles and authors or titles) it could be possible to detect the journals where such content was published and re-cycled. If our hypothesis is correct we can define the whole network of hijacked journals using the method of searching the fake archive of the hijacked journals. Such snowball method can be mostly efficient when the network organization of a fraudulent business is detected, e.g. the content of new PhD theses, newly organized hijacked journals is systematically based on plagiarism from the texts already present within the network.
Methodology
The main goal of this study is to investigate the whole network of hijacked journals by the same organizer(s). I hypothesize that hijacked journals, especially from the same network, share identical texts in archives. The goal of the research is to detect hijacked journals on the basis of the same texts. I hypothesize that fraudulent publishers will not change the titles of the articles in order to create a fictitious archive of the journal. For this case, the search of the titles of articles or the titles of articles with authors will show the link where such a text was published. 0 On the basis of the argument, the methodology was developed. The initial sample of the hijacked journals consisted of several items that were detected manually by searching the content of the clone of Waffen- und Kostümkunde. I extracted articles’ information like title or title together with authors and authors’ affiliation of articles depending on how this data is presented on the website of a hijacked journal (see Appendix 1). This information found in the archive of the clone journals was extracted using a script. Another script searched the extracted data using a
Google Custom Search API , and the first ten Internet addresses were memorized. I manually tested how many exact titles were shown in the Google search. The maximum result was six, and I added four more to account for a possible bias. Then, all Internet links of the search were arranged in alphabetic order. The websites that appeared many times were checked to determine if the journal sites were clones of legitimate journals. Using the snowball method, the archive of the newly detected hijacked journals was analyzed. When the number of detected hijacked journals’ URLs reached 58 I joined all search results and again arranged them in alphabetical order. It allowed to detect several more clone journals. The search was stopped when no new websites of hijacked journals were found. The search was conducted in October 2020 – January 2021. The titles only in the English language were searched. The archive of 61 hijacked journals’ URLs was checked, and 57051 research requests were made.
Results
It was hypothesized that clone journals also use cloned texts. Fraudulent publishers reduce costs and use the same articles to form the fake archives of clone journals. The current study of the content of hijacked journals detected 62 URLs of 57 hijacked journals. Most of the detected clone journals that represented the same network of hijacked journals had identical articles in their archives. At least one stand-alone hijacked journal was identified due to the publication of plagiarized articles or ‘predatory’ authors, and one journal was found due to the identical boards of editors of both a legitimate and another hijacked journal. In most cases, the hijackers used the 1 same texts and just changed the title of the corresponding journal, but in some cases, they failed to even change the titles. The list of hijacked journals obtained from the analysis is presented in Appendix 2. I didn’t include in the research results a number of cases. In the first one it was not possible to distinguish between the legitimate publisher of “International Journal of Advanced Science and Technology” and some other journals of the group and their clones. The second case concerns the journal “Indian Journal of Forensic Medicine & Toxicology”. The alternative website of the journal (medicopublication.com) contains the identical archive of a legitimate journal. The third case is the website tifanjournal.com. With the high probability this website belonged to the network of the hijacked journals but as of December 2020 the domain has expired. There is also the domain pjrpublication.com, it belongs to the network of detected hijacked journals but all links inside this website are redirected to the clone of the Paideuma Journal of Research (paideumajournal.com). Another hijacked journal most likely belonging to the network is
Google Custom Search API.
The graph has a single connected component and it is expectable because a snowball method has been applied. This graph has the average degree of 33,8, it means that on average each clone journal has links with other 33 clone journals. It seems that the same texts were shuffled like a deck of cards and distributed among the clone journals. This business model of the network organization can also be observed in PhD theses mills and paper mills. For example, in Russia, PhD theses mills are based on the circulation of the same texts, which are defended many times by different ‘scholars,’ and the involvement of the same professors who organized dishonest defenses (Abalkina 2020b). The same texts can be used by different fraudulent factories of plagiarized PhD theses. The first case of this network of hijacked journals was recorded in 2017 when the domain of the hijacked Journal for Advanced Research in Applied Sciences was registered. Since 2020, the frequency of hijacked publishing has grown. Approximately 50% of hijacked journal domains were registered (or in several cases, updated) in 2020 (see Figure 2). Nine clone journals were registered on 8 January 2020 alone. 3
Figure 1 The network of clone journals
4 There is also an interesting case of the Cithara journal (citharajournal.com). According to the Whois service, the domain was registered in 1995. It seems that cybercriminals registered the expired domain and updated it on 7 January 2020. The clone journal itself became operative approximately at the beginning of November 2020. Its website always appeared in the research results earlier, but the main webpage did not look like the website of a journal. There was also one nonoperative website of the clone “Drewno Journal” (the domain was registered on 18 August 2020). It already had fake archive content that was detected during the analysis, and it seems that the clone journal will start to cheat authors soon. As of 31 December 2020 the hijacked “Drewno Journal” is not operative.
Figure 2 Date of registration of the domain of clone journals * - For the purpose of the figure, the date of registration of the Cithara journal is considered to be 7 January 2020.
Most of the detected journals belong to one network and are created by the same fraudulent individual(s) or group(s) of individuals. The hijacked journals of the network are created . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . N u m b e r o f c l o n e j o u r n a l s Date of registration
5 according to the same scheme. Most clone journals (with several exceptions) use the identical ISSN number of the original journals on their websites. The titles of the clone journals are slightly changed. Some letters are changed or some additional words such as “Journal”, “Journal of”, “Multidisciplinary Journal”, “Research” or “Research journal of” are added. The clone websites have similarly structured webpages, and some websites are registered on the same day. The boards of editors of the journals are fake and have been copied from international legitimate journals. Such reputable members of the board should attract potential clients, but surprisingly, it can also increase the visibility of clone journals. The search of the provenance of the board of editors of the clone journals allowed to detect another clone journal, Aegaum Journal (aegaum.com). The probability of detecting this journal using content analysis was low due to the archive containing just 12 articles (as of December 2020 – 11 articles). All hijacked journals demonstrated fake and inflated impact factors in the range from 1.07 to 6.3 (the most frequent impact factor was 6.1). The contact emails indicated on the clone websites are mostly from free email services. The DOIs of the articles are also fake, not only because they are not registered but also because some of them do not start with ‘10’, as all DOIs should. It is difficult to detect original papers and recycled papers published in clone journals. However, the authors of the papers published in hijacked journals mainly represent India and other developing countries. Previous research has noted that hijackers create clones of journals published in non-English languages or by small publishers (Jalalian and Mahboobi 2014, Shahri et al. 2016). The analysis of the authentic journals that were hijacked by detected clone journals confirmed the previous findings but also allowed to define more specific groups of journals. - Niche journals on art, archeology, weapons, literature, etc. This strategy to hijack niche journals decreases the probability of being quickly detected. Though clone journals are multidisciplinary, their content does not correspond to the subject area of the original journal. 6 The authentic journals are published in English or a native language. During 2020, a number of Chinese journals were hijacked. The target journals can even be a national cultural heritage in their country of origin, such as Novyi Mir in the USSR/Russia. It is a literature journal that first published “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” by Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. This journal is indexed in the Web of Science, and now it is mimicked by fraudulent publishers as a multidisciplinary journal. - Another category of authentic journals are print journals that do not have URLs. These authentic journals that have been hijacked in the network are mainly published in India. - Journals that stopped publishing. Hijackers cloned several journals that stopped publishing or changed their titles. For example, the authentic Journal of Interdisciplinary Cycle Research was renamed Biological Rhythm Research in 1994. Fraudulent criminal cloning used the old title and ISSN of the journal to cheat potential clients. The journal ‘Science, Technology and Development’ ceased activity, but its data were cloned. This strategy allows cybercriminals to avoid the legal consequences of using the title of an authentic journal. - Journals that are/were indexed in Scopus or the Web of Science. The clones of these journals increase the probability of attracting potential clients who are required to publish in indexed journals. Another interesting finding of the study was that the research results showed many links to predatory journals. This supports the previous finding by Dadkhah et al. (2016b) that texts published in hijacked journals could be plagiarized from other researchers. This study extends the knowledge of the patterns. First, this research confirms the presence of plagiarized text in hijacked journals originating from predatory publishers. Second, hijacked journals published identical texts (with the correct authorship) taken from predatory journals to replenish their 7 archives. Third, I found that the same authors had articles both in predatory and hijacked journals. This could suggest the pattern of ‘predatory’ authors in these journals. The most striking aspect of the detected hijacked journals is in the links to the clone websites and the articles from clone journals penetrating different legitimate scientometric databases (see Table 1).
Table 1 Clone journals in scientometric databases
Scopus Scimago eLibrary
Link to the website of the clone journal
1 3 2
Indexed content from the clone journal
1 - 5
Total number of journals with a link to the clone website and/or indexed content from the clone journal
1 3 5
I found at least three cases of links to clone sites in Scimago. I also detected one case in Scopus where the link to homepage was directed to a clone journal, and the same journal had indexed content in Scopus. The same problem was identified with the Russian database eLibrary, where two journals had incorrect homepages and five journals had fake content in the database. Overall, the information of nine journals (~16%) in different scientometric databases was compromised. These findings may help to understand why hijacked journals are so successful in cheating authors. Hijacked journals create a serious menace for academic integrity. As commented on in the Scimago webpage of the hijacked “Talent Development and Excellence” journal, some content ended up in Scopus where “researchers were not investigators” and were unable to verify 8 the information from a legitimate scientometric database . It is sometimes not easy to distinguish authentic and clone journals, even for professionals. Limitations and discussion
An initial objective of the project was to identify the network of hijacked journals by analyzing the archive of the detected clone journals. This detection method is most effective in identifying hijacked journals that belong to the same network of clone journals. Due to the circulation of texts between hijacked journals, this method also allowed the identification at least one stand-alone hijacked journal: the Journal of Southwest Jiaotong University (jsju.org). This journal and the hijacked
Journal of Composition Theory published nearly identical text but signed by different authors.
In addition to hijacked journals, predatory journals were among the search results. Similar results were detected between articles published in hijacked journals and predatory journals. There have also been authors who had their papers published in both predatory and hijacked journals. ‘Predatory’ authors could be a good predictor of poor-quality journals. The study by the RAS Commission for Counteracting the Falsification of Scientific Research showed that Russian scholars who are mostly involved in publications in predatory journals and plagiarism cases predict predatory journals well (RAS 2020). These findings raise questions regarding the determinants of publications in hijacked journals. Currently, there is still no evidence on the reasons authors publish in hijacked journals, although it is believed that naïve or unexperienced scholars are victims of cybercrime fraud. However, is this the only category of scholars who publish in hijacked journals? We do not have much supportive evidence that the authors are aware of hijacked journals. This could be an important issue for future research on the market of hijacked or predatory journals due to the significant rise in poor-quality or fraudulent journals. There is evidence of high demand for publications in predatory journals to meet the requirements of universities or to obtain financial
9 bonuses. One of the future research topics can be to test the hypothesis that authors can recognize fraudulent journals but still publish in them to cheat the system, to inflate their publication records, etc. because ‘predatory’ authors can be attracted by fraudulent publishers. Another possible research topic is the prediction of hijacked and predatory journals by ‘predatory’ authors.
Conclusions
Despite the limitations, this study contributes in the following ways. First, this study explores a new method of identifying hijacked journals. Most of these journals belong to the same network, e.g., they have the same organizer(s). Hijacked journals from the same network recycle texts to demonstrate continuous publishing in order to cheat potential clients. To date, hijacked journals can be tracked by the Whois service (Bohannon 2015) or can be distinguished by classification algorithms (Dadkhah et al. 2016c; Shahri et al. 2018). This new approach allowed to detect 62 URLs of 57 hijacked journals. Most of these URLs have not been included in the available lists of hijacked or clone journals. This method also allowed to detect at least one stand-alone clone journal. Second, this study has allowed to predict two clone journals before their websites became operational. Before this study, it seems that all hijacked journals were detected post factum . Third, this research improves the current knowledge on the circulation of text similarities. The same texts are circulated between hijacked journals and between hijacked and predatory journals. Fourth, this study confirms the evidence on the target journals that are cloned and expands the evidence on them. Fifth, this study shows that the data and content of nine journals have been compromised in legitimate scientometric databases.
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N Journal (clone) URL (clone) ISSN (clone) Number of search queries Type of search 1
Adalya Journal http://adalyajournal.com/ 1301-2746
Aegaeum Journal http://aegaeum.com/ 0776-3808
Aegaum Journal https://aegaum.com/
12 Title of articles/authors 4
Aut Aut Research Journal http://autrj.com/ 0005-0601
361 Title of articles/authors/ affiliation 6
Bulletin Monumental Journal http://bulletinmonumental.com/ 0007-473X
147 Title of articles/authors/ affiliation 7
644 Title of articles/authors/ affiliation 8
Cithara Journal http://citharajournal.com/ 0009-7527
67 Title of articles/authors/ affiliation 9
Compliance Engineering Journal http://ijceng.com/ 0898-3577
Degres Journal https://degresjournal.com/ 0376-8163
324 Title of articles/authors 11
641 Title of articles 12
Drewno Journal https://drewnojournal.com/** 1644-3985 - - 13
G & O (Gedrag & Organisatie) http://lemma-tijdschriften.com/ 0921-5077
282 Title of articles/authors 14
313 Title of articles/authors/ affiliation 15
Gorteria Journal https://gorteria.com/ 0017-2294
259 Title of articles 16
727 Title of articles/authors 17
International Journal of Information and Computing Science http://ijics.com/ 0972-1347
International Journal of Innovative Research & Studies http://ijirs.in/ International Journal of Research http://ijrpublisher.com/ 2236-6124
Journal for Advanced Research in Applied Sciences http://iaetsdjaras.org/
947 Title of articles/authors/ affiliation 26
Journal of Applied Science and Computations http://j-asc.com/
Journal of Computational Information Systems http://jofcis.org/
816 Title of articles/authors/ affiliation 28
476 Title of articles/authors/ affiliation 29
Journal of Huazhong University of Science and Technology http://hxstxxjns.asia/ 1671-4512
190 Title of articles 30
386 Title of articles/authors 32
Journal of Interdisciplinary Cycle Research http://positifreview.com/ 0022-1945
391 Title of articles/authors/ affiliation 34
Journal of Productivity Management https://journalpm.com/ 1868-8519
190 Title of articles 35
Journal of Scientific Computing http://jscglobal.org/
287 Title of articles/authors/ affiliation 36
Journal of Shanghai Jiaotong University https://shjtdxxb-e.cn/
158 Title of articles 37 Journal of Southwest Jiaotong University http://jsju.org/index.php/journal/index 0258-2724 709 Title of articles Journal of University of Shanghai for Science and Technology https://jusst.org/ 1007-6735
172 Title of articles
39 Journal of Xi’an Shiyou University, Natural Science Edition
Title of articles/authors/ affiliation Journal of Xidian University http://xadzkjdx.cn/ 1001-2400
Mukt Shabd Journal http://shabdbooks.com/
294 Title of articles/authors/ affiliation 44
Paideuma Journal of Research http://paideumajournal.com/
581 Title of articles/authors/ affiliation 45
626 Title of articles/authors/ affiliation 46
Pensee https://penseeresearch.com/ 0031-4773
249 Title of articles 47
Praxis Science and Technology Journal http://praxisonline.org/ 0369-8394
159 Title of articles/authors/ affiliation 49
Proteus Journal http://proteusresearch.org/
359 Title of articles/authors/ affiliation 50
Science and Engineering Journal https://saejournal.com/ 0103-944X
195 Title of articles 51
Science, Technology and Development Multidisciplinary Journal http://journalstd.com/
909 Title of articles/authors/ affiliation 52
Science, Technology and Development Multidisciplinary Journal http://dickensian.org/
346 Title of articles/authors/ affiliation 53
Strad research http://stradresearch.org/ 0039-2049
417 Title of articles/authors/ affiliation 54
Studia Rosenthaliana (Journal for The Study of Research)
346 Title of articles 55 Tierarztilich Praxis http://tierarztliche.com/ 0303-6286
198 Title of articles 57
The International Journal of Analytical and Experimental Modal Analysis
Universal Review http://universalreview.org/* 2277-2723
Vigyan Prakash Journal http://lokvigyanparishad.com/
407 Title of articles/authors/ affiliation 60
338 Title of articles/authors/ affiliation 61
Wutan Huatan Jisuan Jishu
338 Title of articles/authors/ affiliation 62
289 Title of articles/authors/ affiliation *- the website is not working as of 31 December 2020. ** - the website is not operational as of 31 December 2020. Appendix 2 The list of clone journals
N Journal (clone) URL (clone) ISSN (clone) Original journal ISSN original 1 Adalya Journal http://adalyajournal.com/ 1301-2746 Adalya 1301-2746 2 Aegaeum Journal http://aegaeum.com/ 0776-3808 Aegaeum 0776-3808 3 Aegaum Journal https://aegaum.com/
8 Cithara Journal http://citharajournal.com/ 0009-7527 Cithara 0009-7527 9 Compliance Engineering Journal http://ijceng.com/ 0898-3577 Compliance Engineering 0898-3577 10 Degres Journal https://degresjournal.com/ 0376-8163
Degrés
19 International Journal of Innovative Research & Studies http://ijirs.in/ Journal of Computational Information Systems
34 Journal of Productivity Management https://journalpm.com/ 1868-8519 Productivity Management 1868-8519 35 Journal of Scientific Computing http://jscglobal.org/
36 Journal of Shanghai Jiaotong University https://shjtdxxb-e.cn/
Journal of Southwest Jiaotong University http://jsju.org/index.php/journal/index 0258-2724 Xinan Jiaotong Daxue Xuebao/Journal of Southwest Jiaotong University 0258-2724
38 Journal of University of Shanghai for Science and Technology https://jusst.org/ 1007-6735 Shanghai Ligong Daxue Xuebao/Journal of University of Shanghai for Science and Technology 1007-6735 39 Journal of Xi’an Shiyou University, Natural Science Edition
Xi'an Shiyou Daxue Xuebao (Ziran Kexue Ban)/Journal of Xi'an Shiyou University, Natural Sciences Edition
41 Journal of Xidian University http://xadzkjdx.cn/ 1001-2400 Xi'an Dianzi Keji Daxue xuebao/Journal of Xidian University 1001-2400 42 Mukt Shabd Journal http://shabdbooks.com/
48 Praxis Science and Technology Journal http://praxisonline.org/ 0369-8394 Praxis 0369-8394 Proteus Journal http://proteusresearch.org/
Science and Engineering Journal https://saejournal.com/ 0103-944X Ciência & Engenharia/Science and Engineering Journal 0103-944X
51 Science, Technology and Development Multidisciplinary Journal http://journalstd.com/
52 Science, Technology and Development Multidisciplinary Journal http://dickensian.org/
53 Strad research http://stradresearch.org/ 0039-2049 The Strad 0039-2049 54 Studia Rosenthaliana (Journal for The Study of Research)
Suraj Punj Journal
56 Tierarztilich Praxis http://tierarztliche.com/ 0303-6286 Tierärztliche Praxis 0303-6286 57 The International Journal of Analytical and Experimental Modal Analysis
59 Vigyan Prakash Journal http://lokvigyanparishad.com/
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