Leading scholarly database listed hundreds of papers from ‘hijacked’ journals
Scopus is giving suspect, non–peer-reviewed papers unwarranted legitimacy, researchers say.
Leading scholarly database listed hundreds of papers from ‘hijacked’ journals
Scopus is giving suspect, non–peer-reviewed papers unwarranted legitimacy, researchers say
5 DEC. 2023
5:35 PM ET
SHARE:
Scopus, a widely used database of scientific papers operated by publishing giant Elsevier, plays an important role as an arbiter of scholarly legitimacy, with many institutions around the world expecting their researchers to publish in journals indexed on the platform. But users beware, a new study warns. As of September, the database listed 67 “hijacked” journals—legitimate publications taken over by unscrupulous operators to make an illicit profit by charging authors fees of up to $1000 per paper. For some of those journals, Scopus had listed hundreds of papers.
These ersatz publications represent a tiny fraction of the more than 26,000 active, peer-reviewed journals indexed in Scopus. Still, says Anna Abalkina, who authored the study, published on 27 November in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, any number above zero is troubling because it means the scholarly record is being corrupted. Some of the work published in hijacked journals may be legitimate, says Abalkina, a social scientist at the Free University of Berlin. But previous analyses have found that many papers in hijacked journals were plagiarized, fabricated, or published without peer review.
“Nine of these [67] journals are medical journals,” notes Salim Moussa, a marketing professor at the University of Gafsa who has studied hijacked journals. “They and their contents pose a health risk to society.” Of the 67 journals, 41 were still operating as of September, and Abalkina says her list is probably not complete.
SIGN UP FOR THE SCIENCEADVISER NEWSLETTER
The latest news, commentary, and research, free to your inbox daily
In response to Abalkina’s study, Elsevier has “started a thorough investigation of the journals in question, their homepage URLs, and indexed articles,” says Dan DiPietro-James, its global media relations director. Elsevier has already removed 13 journal homepage links from Scopus, he says. “Maintaining the integrity and high-quality, curated content indexed on Scopus is of paramount importance to us.” He says Scopus has already been rooting out suspicious titles by using technology and feedback from researchers and an expert advisory board.
For half of the 67 hijacked journals, Abalkina wasn’t able to determine the method hijackers used. But the others offered insight. For some, thieves paid to renew an expiring internet address before the true owners did. In other cases, hijackers managed to get Scopus to list a URL other than the real journal’s that links to the hijackers’ website, designed to look like the real one.
Abalkina detected the 67 journals in Scopus by checking for 321 hijacked journals identified by other analysts in three separate lists. She says she focused her study on Scopus because anecdotal reports indicated it listed more hijacked journals than other widely used scholarly databases such as Dimensions and Web of Science.
ADVERTISEMENT
She questions whether any change will result from her findings. In 2021, Abalkina pointed out evidence to Elsevier representatives that several of the journals on her list had illicit papers or home page URLs indexed in Scopus under their names; she found they still did in September. “The measures applied by Scopus do not seem to be sufficient.” As of then, Scopus listed at least some hijacked journal papers every year since 2013, she says.
In other cases, Abalkina says, Elsevier independently deleted papers from hijacked journals on the list, but not the journals; Scopus later indexed other, new papers published in those journals. Abalkina refers to the company’s inability to prevent such recurrences as “whack-a-mole.”
Isabelle Robert of the University of Antwerp is chief editor of one of those journals: Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – Themes in Translation Studies. After hijackers created a copycat version of her journal with a URL and papers listed in Scopus, the database did not quickly make corrections, she says. Later, Scopus indexed additional papers from the hijackers’ version. “They really have to do something about this.”
Publishing industry observers say authors can also help. For example, they can consult a list of hijacked journals started in 2022 by Abalkina in cooperation with the Retraction Watch website, which hosts it. The regularly updated list now numbers 236 entries. “Hijacked journals will continue to infiltrate commercial bibliographic databases,” Moussa says, “unless all members of the scholarly publishing ecosystem take coordinated action.”