Scopus indexed a journal with a fake editorial board and a sham archive

Editor’s note: We asked Elsevier to respond to some of the findings in this post. In response, a spokesperson told us they will now remove the journal from Scopus. See Elsevier’s response in this story.

I received a letter recently pointing me to a questionable journal indexed in Elsevier’s Scopus database. Scopus indexes many problematic and even hijacked journals, but this case is the most outrageous I have seen to date.

Scopus indexed Science of Law in July 2024. According to its profile in the database, the journal is published by the “Editorial Team of SoL.”  However, “the editorial team” and many members of the editorial board are fake names and that such individuals do not actually exist. For example, the three editors listed — Alessio Miceli from the University of Alabama School of Law, Anita Steinberg from Wichita State University, and Jeffrey Robinson from McGeorge School of Law — do not have author profiles in Scopus. The universities themselves do not have anyone with these names in their directories. 

The 60-plus members of the editorial board are also most likely fake. Jakub Muchlinski, Sofia Vermeulen and Caspian Magliveras can’t be found in Scopus because such an author probably doesn’t exist.

In reality this journal’s publisher is Online Science Publishing, which publishes 12 more journals, all of which can be identified in Crossref. Science of Law charges a publication fee of $780 USD.

Another red flag for the journal is the anonymous registration of the website domain legal-science.com in December 2023 with GoDaddy. Anonymous registration is a common practice among fraudulent journals.

The timeline raises further concerns. How could a journal with a domain registered in December 2023 be indexed in Scopus in July 2024, when Scopus requires at least two years of regular publication for newly launched journals before indexation? (They did remove that rule in August 2024, after this journal was indexed.) 

The likely answer: The journal backdated the archive and filled it with papers that are probably fabricated and “authored” by nonexistent researchers for issues starting in 2021 through the second issue of 2024 to demonstrate its continuous and regular publication. 

But that is hard to verify because the full text of articles is not freely accessible, which is very typical for problematic journals. For example, hijacked journals also have a fake archive that you can access only with a “subscription.” 

All the papers from these issues are currently indexed in Scopus. And, according to the database, some of these papers cite others in the journal. 

While the papers published before Scopus indexed the journal are likely fake, the third issue of 2024 most likely consists of real submissions. However, many published papers also have red flags. For example, there are collaboration anomalies, such as multiple affiliations per paper, a sign of paper mill production.

This case is shocking. It demonstrates that Scopus, “the world’s largest, comprehensive and trusted academic database,” can’t be trusted due to vulnerabilities in the evaluation processes and a lack of ability to identify fraudulent publishers. This is a very evident case of a fake journal that should have been immediately rejected during the evaluation process. This case demonstrates the failure of evaluation by the Content Selection and Advisory Board and content control in Scopus.  

It also shows that fraudsters now don’t need to buy a journal indexed in Scopus to publish problematic papers, as happened with many journals like Migration Letters and Journal of Namibian Studies. It is enough to create a fake journal with a fake editorial board and a fake archive to be indexed in one of the leading databases.

The experience of recent years shows that fraudulent publishing has increased, together with paper mills and fake, predatory or hijacked journals. Such bad practices are legitimized by indexing databases, and the lack of quality integrity control will lead to a decrease in trust in data quality.

To respond to the threats of fraudulent publishers, the databases collecting the scientific record must have an in-house research integrity board to identify bad actors. It should include research integrity experts who would proactively identify patterns of problematic journals, fraudulent publishers that hunt for journals indexed in bibliographic databases, hijacked and predatory journals. Without that, it only incentivizes fraudulent activity. 

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