Have you heard about hijacked journals?
Hijacked journals mimic legitimate journals by adopting their titles, ISSNs, and other metadata. Usually, hijacked journals mirror legitimate journals without permission from the original journal. In rare instances, publishers will buy rights to a legitimate journal but continue the publication under considerably less stringent publishing protocols and without clearly noting to the reader the change in ownership or publication standards (sometimes known as “cloned” journals).
Retraction Watch already provides three exceptional services: 1. News alerts (in the form of daily and weekly emails and internet postings). 2. Their phenomenal retraction database. 3. Expert commentary in the research integrity field. So the introduction of this new service, relating to hijacked journals is a pleasant and welcome surprise. As always, love ya work Retraction Watch! We have included links to ten related items.
We’re hoping to put an end to that sort of thing: Introducing the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker.
Tracking these journals is no mean feat, but knowing which journals may have been hijacked is vital to the world of publishing integrity. Anna Abalkina became involved in the process when she and her colleagues, investigating allegations of plagiarism, came across several titles including the Journal of Talent Development and Excellence, which drastically increased its indexing of papers in Scopus in 2020, and Waffen-und Kostümkunde, a journal which cited a paper on psychology absolutely unrelated to the weapons and costume specialization of the journal. Abalkina then began analyzing these journal archives and found overlaps with other apparently hijacked journals, devoting huge swaths of time locating and cross-checking the validity of journals suspected of hijacking or of being hijacked.
