(5 Dec 2023) Scopus, a widely used database of scientific papers operated by publishing giant Elsevier, plays an important role as an arbiter of scholarly legitimacy, with many institutions around the world expecting their researchers to publish in journals indexed on the platform. But users beware, a new study warns. As of September, the database listed 67 “hijacked” journals—legitimate publications taken over by unscrupulous operators to make an illicit profit by charging authors fees of up to $1000 per paper. For some of those journals, Scopus had listed hundreds of papers.
These ersatz publications represent a tiny fraction of the more than 26,000 active, peer-reviewed journals indexed in Scopus. Still, says Anna Abalkina, who authored the study, published on 27 November in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, any number above zero is troubling because it means the scholarly record is being corrupted. Some of the work published in hijacked journals may be legitimate, says Abalkina, a social scientist at the Free University of Berlin. But previous analyses have found that many papers in hijacked journals were plagiarized, fabricated, or published without peer review.
Science has the article in full here.
