How to spot hijacked journals

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).

Scholars can be duped into publishing in hijacked journals – many of which require fees – by offers of fast publication and indexing in databases such as Scopus; being indexed in such databases is viewed by many universities and governments as a mark of legitimacy. Even the WHO’s COVID literature database has been fooled.

Retraction Watch has launched a Hijacked Journal Checker, a list of journals that mimic legitimate publications by adopting their titles and metadata. Academics can consult the list to avoid being duped into publishing in scam journals. Retraction Watch developed the tracker with researcher Anna Abalkina, who has spent huge amounts of time checking suspect journals.

Here you will find the list of these journals:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ak985WGOgGbJRJbZFanoktAN_UF...