Caution, Clon magazines!

Clon magazines, or, as it is customary to call them in English-speaking literature, Hijacked Journals , are fraudulent sites that use the name, ISSN and other metadata of original magazines to deceive potential authors. The phenomenon of clone magazines originated 10 years ago. Over this period, more than 200 magazines were “stolen”, however, since many cases of abduction have not been documented or not found, their real number is much larger and it is not possible to establish it.

Fraudsters use several methods of "abduction" of the magazine. Firstly, they re-register the expired domain. In 2015, an American scientific journalist and researcher John Bohannon conducted a home pages in the profiles of magazines in Web of Science and found out that 24 domains were stolen, of which two domains were organized by clone magazines [ 1 ]. Secondly, scammers can hack the site of the original magazine, as happened with Talent Development and Excellence [ 2 ]. Thirdly, cyber abusions create a website clone that should attract potential customers.

Clon magazines pose a threat to the academic community and scientific communication, since articles that have not undergone review are issued for real scientific publications. In addition, such publications form an inadequate assessment of the merits of the authors. The articles that were submitted to the Clon magazines are not considered published, and after the expiration of the deadline for the domain registration, texts can be lost forever.

To date, there are several lists of clone magazines [ 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 ], but they are updated irregularly and untimely. This plays into the hands of fraudsters who get the opportunity to mislead the authors for a longer time. An even greater concern is the penetration of clone magazines into international databases. In particular, the addresses of home pages of several magazines ( Journal of Engineering ; Computing and Architecture ; Compliance Engineering Journal ; Jac: A Journal of Composition Theory ) Journal & Country Rank were replaced by the sites of clone magazines.

Over the past few years, more and more evidence of indexing the illegitimate content of clone magazines in Scopus [ 2 , 7 , 8 , 9 ] has appeared. Such cases are often perceived as single fraud that do not play a big role in the Scopus array, but it seems that this problem is significantly underestimated. On the one hand, fraudsters manage to index thousands of articles filed in clone magazines, as is happening with Annals of the Romanian Society for Cell Biology [ 7 ]. On the other hand, in the profiles of individual countries, illegitimate content can be significant. According to absolute indicators, the main authors in the clone magazines are authors from India, Iraq, Indonesia, Malaysia, as well as the post-Soviet space. Moreover, if you consider the share of unauthorized content in countries-for this you can even introduce a new scientometric indicator: the proportion of illegitimate content in Scopus by countries for a certain year, it turns out that articles in clone magazines indexed in SCOPUS in 2021 amounted to 41.52% regarding all indexed in the same year Articles, in Iraq - 8.41%, in India - 1.55% [ 7 ].

Cyberrsenniki indexes thousands of articles in Scopus, and after the discovery of illegitimate SCOPUS content, as a rule (but not always), removes such articles. It would seem that the removal of articles from clone magazines should restore justice, if not for several additional circumstances.

Firstly, the removal of content occurs not depending on the legitimacy of the content, but in a year (they can remove numbers in 2021, but leave for the 2019th and 2020). This means that part of the dubious content, according to my observations, is still indexed in Scopus (see for example, articles for 2020, and, possibly, for 2019 in the journal Test Engineering & Management ). The opposite situation is also possible when removal occurs with original content, as it may have occurred in the case of Turkish magazine Turkish Journal of Computer and Mathematics Education . The first number of 2021 was also removed also.

Andrey Rostovtsev , Coorganizer "Dissernet":

“It is known that Scopus and Wos are very reluctant to remove already indexed content. As they explain, this is due to the need to recalculate many ratings and bibliometric data, which often represent a commercial product already delivered to the consumer. And they don’t really want to recall the results of their work. ”

Secondly, apparently, cases of removal of content are not registered; This procedure itself is extremely opaque, in contrast to the removal of individual magazine numbers due to violation of academic ethics or winding indicators.

On May 24–27, 2021, the Conference “Scientific Edition of the International Level - 2021: World Trends and National Priorities” was held in Moscow. This conference was performed by the representative of Elsevier Tracy Chen with the report “Scopus as a reliable source of quality data: the results of 2020 and the roadmap for 2021”. In her report, she noted how difficult it is to discover clones in Scopus. This position of this database of scientific quoting indicates the Scopus reactive policy in relation to the clone magazines, which is not aimed at preventing, but at the removal of the content that was illegitimately loaded.

In the conference chat, I asked Trace Chen two questions:

Does Scopus have an understanding of how the clone magazines penetrate into Scopus?

Are there any registration of cases of seized illegitimate content?

During the conference, Tracy Chen did not answer these questions, but during the performance she invited the participants to discuss the report outside the conference. I twice wrote Trace Chen to the email working address and asked these two questions. In her letter, she noted that “Scopus is not an arbiter of publicational dishonesty”, as well as that the database “will not make statements about whether the journal is predatory or clone. This is not the role of Scopus, this is not what we are working for. ”

In my opinion, the process of removing illegitimate content from Scopus should be transparent to prevent further deception of the authors - after all, indexation of the magazine in Scopus is often a decisive factor when filing an article in such a journal. Therefore, given the position of Scopus with the silence of the problem of penetration of clone magazines, we based on the available data compiled a list of those clone magazines that were indexed in the International SCOPUS base [ 10 ].

I would also like to turn to the scientific community: dear colleagues, if you know about cases of penetration of clone magazines in SCOPUS, please inform in the comments on this article on the website of the TRV-hunger or to the address of my e-mail, indicated in [ 10 ].

Anna Abalkina, Cand. Econ. Sciences, phd