Clone journals: a threat to medical research

Abstract

The scholarly world is currently facing various anomalous threats that include paid publishers and fake journals. There has been enough debate about the challenges of predatory publishers, which encourage authors to publish their work in unreliable peer-reviewed journals, for a price.A new discussion has spread across the scholarly world regarding fake journals. This is a recent phenomenon of even more malevolent fraud that has broken into the realm of the academic world. This phenomenon is also commonly known as "hijacked journals" or "clone journals. "

Breaking free from academic scams: Five key reflections on the cloned journal conundrum

“…It is understandable that inattentive authors may inadvertently fall prey to these fraudulent practices, ultimately paying article processing charges with the belief that their work is about to be published in a reputable journal. Many of these deceitful journals actively search for authors by scouring recent conference proceedings in order to obtain participants' email addresses (Asim & Sorooshian, 2020).…”

“…Hijacked journals infringe upon the intellectual property rights of legitimate publications by replicating their ISSNs and titles (Abalkina, 2021; Bohannon, 2015; Dadkhah & Borchardt, 2016; Lukić et al, 2014). As they copy the ISSN, these hijacked journals operate without legal registration by running a parallel website or web page that mirrors the original journal, including the domain name (Asim & Sorooshian, 2020; Moussa, 2021). They artificially inflate their impact factors or other research metrics, offer subpar or non‐existent peer review, and exploit the open access publishing model by imposing article processing charges (Jalalian & Mahboobi, 2013).…”

Publishing at Any Cost? The Need for the Improvement of the Quality of Scholarly Publications

“…As these journals "stole" the image from the authentic journal they cloned, they often get high impact factor from important indexing databases, e.g. Clarivate Analytics and Scopus (Asim & Sorooshian, 2020). Table 2 depicts the main features of clone journals.…”

Study of the Causes and Consequences of Cloned Journal Publications

“…While predatory journals use a fake title in their publication, a cloned journal uses the same title as a reputed journal and shows the same International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) on its website [ 3 ]. Cloned journals develop a mirror image of reputed journals and attract more articles than predatory journals [ 4 ]. The menace of predatory and cloned journals has sharply risen post-pandemic [ 5 ].…”