A high-quality cloned journal has duped hundreds of scholars, and has no reason to stop

Have you heard about hijacked journals, which take over legitimate publications’ titles, ISSNs, and other metadata without their permission? We recently launched the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, and will be publishing regular posts like this one to tell the stories of some of those cases. 

In 2021, I created an alert on Scopus to keep me updated about new publications in the Hong Kong Journal of Social Sciences, which had been hijacked by fraudulent publishers. I wanted to know if unauthorized content from this hijacked journal ended up in the index. 

However, I forgot about the alert until last month, when I received three notifications from Scopus regarding new publications in the journal.

These notifications included lists of a dozen papers indexed in Scopus, all of them originating from the hijacked version of the journal. Inspecting the profile of the journal showed that probably more than 55 papers from the hijackers are currently indexed in Scopus:

The hijacking of the Hong Kong Journal of Social Sciences started in 2019, when the web domain of the clone journal was created. 

The hijackers’ website mimicked the genuine journal well. The archive of past issues included papers from the genuine journal. Additionally, the clone journal falsely claimed that it was indexed in Scopus and Web of Science and adhered to the ethical principles set by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Although the papers were published online in English, the title and abstract of each paper were translated into Chinese to make the hijacked journal appear authentic. However, the Chinese versions were most likely machine-translated. 

In other words, the hijacked Hong Kong Journal of Social Sciences is a high quality clone, and hundreds of scholars have been duped by the fraudulent journal over several years.

The original journal became aware of the problem and informed potential authors:

Screenshot from April 2022.

“We have been alerted that some English websites have collected payments from authors for publications on the pretext of our Journal’s English and Chinese titles, i.e. Hong Kong Journal of Social Sciences (香港社會科學學報), ISSN and Journal’s cover. The Journal solemnly clarifies that we are an academic journal only publishes papers written in Chinese, and do not charge from authors. If in doubt, please contact us at [email protected]”.

This fraudulent journal could continue to publish dozens of papers, charging 300 euros each, while  the genuine journal, according to the information on one Chinese website, ceased publishing in 2022, with volume 58 as its final issue. The website of the genuine journal is not available anymore. 

If the genuine Hong Kong Journal of Social Sciences has really stopped publishing, this opens a new opportunity for the hijacked journal, because the clone website remains the only one for the title. Evidence from other cases also suggests that hijackers are particularly interested in cloning journals that have stopped publishing. Thus, the hijacked Hong Kong Journal of Social Sciences succeeded in penetrating Scopus with an issue 59, published in 2022. All the new papers were published in English, unlike the genuine journal, which was published in Chinese.

Many of the papers published in this hijacked journal, including those which, according to Scopus, were funded by various universities, the Connecting Europe Facility, and the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research, are not considered as having been officially published. Furthermore, the money from universities and international organizations may have gone to fraudulent publishers.

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