About ghost magazines

The website of the RGNF (Russian Humanitarian Scientific Foundation) published a list of Russian journals in the social sciences and humanities indexed in the Web of Science [1]. The idea itself is very good, because knowing whether a given journal is indexed in international resources is not nearly as obvious as we would like, if only because first you need to have access to these databases. Therefore, the RGNF, as written on the corresponding page, “decided to post on the fund’s website lists of domestic journals whose publications are indexed in WoS or Scopus.” We begin to read the list of these journals, entitled “List of Russian journals included in the Web of Science database, 2013,” which includes five journals in the social sciences and seven journals in the humanities. In the list of twelve journals we find four non-existent domestic journals. There is no such journal “Anthropology and Archeology” (No. 1 on the list) and there is no such Russian journal “Russian Linguistics”, not to mention the mysterious “Russian Studies in Philosophy” and “Russian Studies in Literature” (numbers 5 and 6 on the list) . Where did they come from? Most likely, “Anthropology and Archeology” is a highly distorted name for “Archaeology, Anthropology and Ethnography of Eurasia” (not the only contender, but the most plausible). The story with “Russian Linguistics” is even more interesting. There is no such domestic journal “Russian Linguistics”, but there is a journal Russian Linguistics , a prestigious journal on Slavic studies, published by the very famous Springer publishing house [2]. One can easily guess that exactly the same substitution occurred with the incomprehensible publications “Russian Studies in Philosophy” and “Russian Studies in Literature,” next to which there are mysterious notes “translation of individual articles.” In fact, these are English-language publications, truly built on translations of individual Russian articles, owned by the private American publishing house ME Sharpe [3], that is, they are not “Russian magazines” at all. Thus, the list was compiled unprofessionally: out of twelve journals, four turned out to be in some way “fake”: three of them do not exist as Russian journals and should be included in the list of “Foreign indexed journals on Russian topics,” and what did the compilers mean by the title “ Anthropology and archeology" - this is still a question.