Improper legitimization of hijacked journals through citations

Anna Abalkina (1) , Guillaume Cabanac (2) , Cyril Labbé (3) , Alexander Magazinov (4)

1 Freie Universität Berlin
2 IRIT-IRIS - Recherche d’Information et Synthèse d’Information
3 SIGMA - Systèmes d’Information - inGénierie et Modélisation Adaptables
4 Yandex [Moscou]

The goal is to study the prevalence of citajacked papers: papers in authentic scientific journals citing hijacked journals, in academic literature. A Citejacked detector was designed as a part of the Problematic Paper Screener (https://www.irit.fr/~Guillaume.Cabanac/problematic-paper-screener/citejacked) to trace if the references to articles originating from hijacked journals infiltrate scientific communication. A full-text search was performed between November 2021 and January 2022 in the Dimensions database using the name of 1 of the 12 hijacked journals. The analysis of the bibliography in these articles revealed that 828 of them cite unreliable articles from hijacked journals. During 01.Jan.2021-31.Jan.2022, an average of 2 citejacked articles has been published daily in established journals. Given the limited number of titles included in this study, the phenomenon might be wider and is not yet systematically studied.

Domaines: Sciences de l'information et de la communication; Recherche d'information [cs.IR]; Réseaux sociaux et d'information [cs.SI]

Anna Abalkina, Guillaume Cabanac, Cyril Labbé, Alexander Magazinov. Improper legitimization of hijacked journals through citations. 9th International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication (2022), JAMA Network, Sep 2022, Chicago, United States. ⟨10.48550/arXiv.2209.04703⟩. ⟨hal-03777383⟩