Anna Abalkina

• Freie Universität Berlin

Fraudulent published papers were once thought to be rare, but in recent years, there has been growing awareness of coordinated activities by for‐profit organizations that charge authors a fee to sell articles and submit them to reputable journals. These are known as paper mills. We reflect here on how Mind, Brain and Education suffered from such an...

Research paper mills are covert organizations that provide low-quality or fabricated manuscripts to paying clients. As members of the United2Act Research Working Group, we propose 5 key research questions on paper mills that require resourcing and support.

According to an estimate, there are at least 400,000 papers in the scientific literature originating from paper mills, which are for-profit companies that guarantee the publication of low-quality papers. There is evidence that such papers are accompanied by various forms of scientific misconduct, including plagiarism, image duplication, falsificati...

Background: The study examines the prevalence of plagiarism in hijacked journals, a category of problematic journals that have proliferated over the past decade. Methods: A quasi-random sample of 936 papers published in 58 hijacked journals that provided free access to their archive as of June 2021 was selected for the analysis. The study utiliz...

We first describe the phenomenon of the academic paper mill, a kind of large-scale fraud in which authors pay to have work published in reputable journals. We give examples of some known paper mills and discuss ‘red flags’ that characterise their outputs. Most of the early examples were in biomedical and computational sciences and so paper mills ar...

This study presents and explains the phenomenon of indexjacking , which involves the systematic infiltration of hijacked journals into international indexing databases, with Scopus being one of the most infiltrated among these databases. Through an analysis of known lists of hijacked journals, the study identified at least 67 hijacked journals that...

Fraudulent published papers used to be thought to be rare, but in recent years there has been growing awareness of coordinated activities by organizations that charge authors a fee to plant articles in reputable journals. These are known as paper mills. We reflect here on how Mind, Brain and Education suffered from such an attack in 2022 and 2023,...

This study attempts to detect papers originating from the Russia‐based paper mill ‘International Publisher’ LLC. A total of 1,063 offers to purchase co‐authorship on a fraudulent papers published from 2019 to mid‐2022 on the 123mi.ru website were analysed. This study identifies at least 451 papers that are potentially linked to the paper mill, incl...

This study looks at academic integrity policies relating to research at Russian universities, focusing on two main aspects of academic misconduct. First, it reviews evidence of massive plagiarism in PhD theses in Russia and discusses possible reasons and consequences. Second, it provides evidence about the impact of the introduction of policies for...

Article about a journal that has been hijacked multiple times. It appeared on Retraction Watch: Abalkina, A., & Keller, R. (2023). How many times can a journal be hijacked? Retraction Watch. Retrieved from https://retractionwatch.com/2023/02/24/how-many-times-can-a-journal-be-hijacked/

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 origi...

Aims: To consider the strategies that academic ‘paper mills’ may use to target journals in psychology. Methods: We conducted an analysis of articles appearing in The Journal of Community Psychology that were characterised by suspicious author emails. Results: Six papers met the criterion for inclusion. In five cases there was circumstantial evidenc...

This study attempts to detect papers originating from the Russian paper mill 'International publisher' LLC. A total of 975 offers published during 2019-2021 on the 123mi.ru website were analysed. The study allowed us to identify at least 303 papers (31%) that are potentially linked to the paper mill. Further evidence of suspicious provenance from t...

This paper reviews the proliferation of hijacked journals in scientific communication. Hijacked journals mimic genuine journals, deceive potential authors, use more sophisticated methods of fraud and compromise the content and information of legitimate journals in international and national scientometric databases. The lists of hijacked journals ar...

This study describes a method for identifying hijacked journal domains based on an analysis of the archives of clone journals. This method is based on the argument that fraudulent publishers recycle identical papers to create a fictitious archive for a hijacked journal. A Google Custom Search API is used to search the details of papers published in...

This is the first attempt to create the list of hijacked journals which compromised data or content in the international citation database Scopus (see Appendix 1). The creation of such a list of hijacked journals in Scopus increases the awareness of journal hijacking which is important for research integrity. I invite researchers to comment on the...

This study describes a method to detect hijacked journals based on the analysis of the archives of clone journals. This approach is most effective in discovering a network of hijacked journals that have the same organizer(s). Analysis of the archives of clone journals allowed to detect 61 URLs of hijacked journals. It also provided the possibility...

The private sector was proclaimed by the Addis Ababa Action Agenda as an important actor in development cooperation and the implementation of Agenda 2030. The private sector is considered to be a source of additional capital together with official development flows in order to achieve the SDGs. The ambitious goal to engage private capital raises a...

This paper investigates whether politicians who have plagiarized their PhD dissertations perform worse in running their polities than those who have not committed plagiarism. We look at the Russian regional governors and document that a substantial portion of them have plagiarized PhD theses. We find a negative association between plagiarized PhD o...

Over past decades, extensive evidence has emerged on thousands of cases of plagiarised dissertations that were prepared by dozens of dissertation mills in Russia. Their organisational structure, as well as the high tolerance of plagiarism in Russia, have allowed the mills to develop their dishonest business with impunity. Dissertations have become...

During last decade Russian research is characterized, on the one hand, by a rather high level of academic dishonesty, and on the other, by the activity of some scientific community to fight academic misconduct, which should lead to the adjustment of the norms on the admissibility of plagiarism or other forms of violation of academic ethics. However...