Category: by publisher

Elsevier is investigating the journal Geoscience Frontiers after a PubPeer thread flagged an editorial advisor whose articles in the journal were edited by his frequent co-authors. 

The editorial advisor, M. Santosh, is a professor at the University of Adelaide in Australia and a “Highly Cited Researcher” with more than 1,500 published articles, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

The PubPeer commenter, “Desmococcus antarctica,” noted that two associate editors of the journal, Vinod O. Samuel of Yonsei University in Seoul and Erath Shaji of the University of Kerala in Thiruvananthapuram, India,  are often listed as “Handling Editors” of Santosh’s articles published in Geoscience Frontiers — despite each frequently publishing other work with him. 

As Retraction Watch recently reported, three of the top 10 philosophy journals in the highly influential Scopus database turned out to be fakes: Not only did these dubious journals manage to infiltrate the list, but they also rose to its top by trading citations. This news is embarrassing in itself, but it is hardly shocking. Our rankings-obsessed academic culture has proven time and again that it is prone to data manipulation. Rankings for both publications and institutions are routinely hacked by scholars, editors, and administrators who are ready to tweak or even falsify numbers as needed. 

The problems with the Scopus journal rankings, however, run much deeper. The issue is not that inflated citation numbers have occasionally propelled impostor journals to the top of the list. Rather, at least in my own field of literary studies, the ranking makes no sense whatsoever: the list is full of journals that have no business being there at all because they belong to entirely different areas of scholarly enquiry, and even when the ranking gets the field right, it systematically places marginal publications close to the top. In what follows, I briefly break down the major ways the Scopus Literature and Literary Theory Ranking is not just skewed but downright nonsensical.

A prolific hijacked journal has managed to breach the defenses of Scopus, one of the world’s leading academic databases. This time, the target is the award-winning journal Community Practitioner, the official publication of the UK-based organization Unite-CPHVA.

On July 7, 2023, I reported via 𝕏 that the journal’s homepage in Scopus had been compromised and was redirecting users to a fraudulent website masquerading as the legitimate publication. 

Despite this revelation, the journal’s editorial team remained unresponsive, neglecting to issue any warnings to authors about the deceptive clone. In December 2023, Scopus took action, removing links to the homepage of the publication in an effort to combat hijacking.

When Ina Vandebroek read the latest edition of Pharmacognosy, an Elsevier textbook to which she contributed a chapter for the 2017 edition, she was shocked. Although she had declined to write for the 2023 update, her chapter was still in the book, under a different author’s name.

“When I first saw this, it was like somebody hit me on the head with a hammer and everything that I’d worked for all my life was put into question,” Vandebroek, an ethnobotanist and senior research fellow at the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Kingston, Jamaica, told Retraction Watch. “This shakes my foundation of what I think science should stand for.”

The situation arose when one of the textbook’s editors, Simone Ann Marie Badal, a researcher at UWI, asked if Vandebroek wanted to revise her chapter for the new edition. Vandebroek declined, assuming her chapter would be omitted from the book.

Last December, Elsevier’s Scopus index deleted all links to journal homepages in response to the widespread issue of journal hijacking, when a legitimate title, website, ISSN, and other metadata of a journal are taken over without permission. 

Scopus has been a major target. I’ve cataloged 67 cases since 2013 of hijacked journals penetrating the database.  I found 23 profiles of journals that contained links to a cloned version, and 33 cases of content from the cloned version of a journal that had not been peer reviewed appearing in the profile of the legitimate journal, while 11 did both.

Since the deletion of all homepage links in the profiles of journals in Scopus, how journal hijackers would adapt their shady business practices has been unclear. We assumed they would continue hijacking new journals,  would they continue to target Scopus, given they could index only unauthorized content? 

Now, we have evidence hijacked journals remain in the database and continue to infiltrate it.

Last July, David Allison and his students identified what they considered to be fatal errors in a paper that had appeared in Elsevier’s Diabetes Research and Clinical Practice.

The authors of the article, led by Sergio Di Molfetta, of University of Bari Aldo Moro in Bari, Italy, used a cluster randomized controlled trial, but did an improper statistical analysis, according to Allison’s group. 

In August, Allison, dean of Indiana University’s School of Public Health in Bloomington, and his colleagues requested the authors’ data.

Then they hit a wall.