A World Health Organization (WHO) database of papers about COVID-19 contains hundreds of articles published in hijacked journals whose publishers have stolen titles and legitimacy from the original publications.
That’s what I found when I analyzed the WHO’s “COVID-19 Global literature on coronavirus disease,” which as of August 1 included more than 318,000 papers sourced from typically trusted databases including the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s Medline, Elsevier’s Scopus, and Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
But the collection hosts hundreds of papers published in hijacked journals with fraudulent publishing practices. Hijacked, or clone, journals mimic legitimate publishers by creating a clone website or registering an expired one. They accept papers — often wildly out of scope of the original publication — without peer review, and collect fees from the authors.
My review found 383 papers from three hijacked journals in the database that were imported from Scopus. Following a post on Retraction Watch about how hijacked journals duped Scopus, Scopus removed these papers, but they are still in the WHO library. (Scopus does not announce or otherwise publicly register these removals.) Ten appeared in the hijacked version of Linguistica Antverpiensia, 169 in the fraudulent edition of the Turkish Journal of Computer and Mathematics Education (TURCOMAT), and 204 were published in the compromised version of the Annals of the Romanian Society for Cell Biology.
It’s obvious that papers about the pandemic don’t correspond to these journals’ typical coverage areas. Take, for example, a paper on “The Technology of Mobile Banking and Its Impact on the Financial Growth during the Covid-19 Pandemic in the Gulf Region” in TURCOMAT. What, exactly, does that have to do with mathematics and education? Or “Covid-19 and its repercussion on the nutritional status and gestational anemia from socio-demographic-obstetric factors,” a paper in Linguistica Antverpiensia that has nothing to do with linguistics. This is very typical for hijacked journals, which accept all submitted multidisciplinary papers to collect fees.
Papers published in hijacked journals pollute academic communication and provide non-peer-reviewed and often poor-quality material, frequently containing plagiarism or other types of academic misconduct. The presence of papers from hijacked journals in “COVID-19 Global literature on coronavirus disease” confers false legitimacy on them.
I asked Tomas Allen, of the WHO library, to comment. He said:
At the moment, a colleague is reviewing the matter of potential hijacked journals. As you are probably aware, we are compiling the citations from various resources such as PubMed, Embase, DOAJ etc. The complete search strategy is located at this link.
https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/quick-search-guide-who-covid-19-database
For transparency, we will need to review carefully the various titles and determine the best way forward.
Currently the research community is seeing an increasing amount of publications being produced, both peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed, from many resources. WHO staff always critically grades the evidence before incorporation into any guidance.
As soon as we have had a moment to review the citations, we will be able to respond to you with more details. At this moment it would be too soon for us to make any comment.
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No big deal. It’s not like anyone listens to the WHO anymore. If we did, air travel would still be at 2019 levels, public masking would only recently have been introduced in western countries and no teenagers would be getting vaccinated.
“WHO staff always critically grades the evidence before incorporation into any guidance.” – Tomas Allen, WHO library.
Probably it is time to seriously look at the guidelines, procedures & qualifications of those WHO staff who are doing the screening of literature. Literature quantity in a database should not be a criterion. It should be quality & credibility. It is events like this that seriously undermine the believability of WHO communications. This is now even more critical during this [prolonged] global pandemic. WHO, please do better.