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Masquerade of authority: hijacked journals are gaining more credibility than original ones

  • Mihály Hegedűs ORCID logo , Mehdi Dadkhah ORCID logo EMAIL logo and Lóránt D. Dávid ORCID logo
Published/Copyright: July 3, 2024
Diagnosis
From the journal Diagnosis Volume 11 Issue 3

Abstract

At the moment, the academic world is faced with various challenges that negatively impact science integrity. One is hijacked journals, a second, inauthentic website for indexed legitimate journals, managed by cybercriminals. These journals publish any manuscript by charging authors and pose a risk to scientific integrity. This piece compares a journal’s original and hijacked versions regarding authority in search engines. A list of 16 medical journals, along with their hijacked versions, has been collected. The MOZ Domain Authority has been used to check the authority of both original and hijacked journals, and the results have been discussed. It indicates that hijacked journals are gaining more credibility than original ones. This should alarm academia and highlights a need for serious action against hijacked journals. The related policies should be planned, and tools should be developed to support easy detection of hijacked journals. On the publishers’ side, the visibility of journals’ websites must be enhanced to address this issue.

Keywords: hijacked journal; domain authority; citation databases; science integrity; artificial intelligence
Corresponding author: Mehdi Dadkhah, Amrita School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amritapuri, Kerala, India, E-mail:

Funding source: Flagship Research Groups Programme of the Hungarian University of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

Award Identifier / Grant number: This work was supported by the Flagship Research Groups Programme of the Hungarian University of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

Acknowledgments

The AI has been used only for improving readability of texts not writing from scratch. The possible usage of AI for methodological purpose has been clarified in methodology section.

  1. Research ethics: The local Institutional Review Board deemed the study exempt from review.

  2. Informed consent: Not applicable.

  3. Author contributions: All authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this manuscript and approved its submission.

  4. Competing interests: The authors state no conflict of interest.

  5. Research funding: This work was supported by the Flagship Research Groups Programme of the Hungarian University of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

  6. Data availability: The raw data can be obtained on request from the corresponding author.

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Received: 2024-05-02
Accepted: 2024-05-31
Published Online: 2024-07-03

© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. The growing threat of hijacked journals
  4. Review
  5. Effects of SNAPPS in clinical reasoning teaching: a systematic review with meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials
  6. Mini Review
  7. Diagnostic value of D-dimer in differentiating multisystem inflammatory syndrome in Children (MIS-C) from Kawasaki disease: systematic literature review and meta-analysis
  8. Opinion Papers
  9. Masquerade of authority: hijacked journals are gaining more credibility than original ones
  10. FRAMED: a framework facilitating insight problem solving
  11. Algorithms in medical decision-making and in everyday life: what’s the difference?
  12. Original Articles
  13. Computerized diagnostic decision support systems – a comparative performance study of Isabel Pro vs. ChatGPT4
  14. Comparative analysis of diagnostic accuracy in endodontic assessments: dental students vs. artificial intelligence
  15. Assessing the Revised Safer Dx Instrument® in the understanding of ambulatory system design changes for type 1 diabetes and autism spectrum disorder in pediatrics
  16. The Big Three diagnostic errors through reflections of Japanese internists
  17. SASAN: ground truth for the effective segmentation and classification of skin cancer using biopsy images
  18. Computable phenotype for diagnostic error: developing the data schema for application of symptom-disease pair analysis of diagnostic error (SPADE)
  19. Development of a disease-based hospital-level diagnostic intensity index
  20. HbA1c and fasting plasma glucose levels are equally related to incident cardiovascular risk in a high CVD risk population without known diabetes
  21. Short Communications
  22. Can ChatGPT-4 evaluate whether a differential diagnosis list contains the correct diagnosis as accurately as a physician?
  23. Analysis of thicknesses of blood collection needle by scanning electron microscopy reveals wide heterogeneity
  24. Letters to the Editor
  25. For any disease a human can imagine, ChatGPT can generate a fake report
  26. The dilemma of epilepsy diagnosis in Pakistan
  27. The Japanese universal health insurance system in the context of diagnostic equity
  28. Case Report – Lessons in Clinical Reasoning
  29. Lessons in clinical reasoning – pitfalls, myths, and pearls: a case of tarsal tunnel syndrome caused by an intraneural ganglion cyst
https://doi.org/10.1515/dx-2024-0082
Keywords for this article
hijacked journal; domain authority; citation databases; science integrity; artificial intelligence

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. The growing threat of hijacked journals
  4. Review
  5. Effects of SNAPPS in clinical reasoning teaching: a systematic review with meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials
  6. Mini Review
  7. Diagnostic value of D-dimer in differentiating multisystem inflammatory syndrome in Children (MIS-C) from Kawasaki disease: systematic literature review and meta-analysis
  8. Opinion Papers
  9. Masquerade of authority: hijacked journals are gaining more credibility than original ones
  10. FRAMED: a framework facilitating insight problem solving
  11. Algorithms in medical decision-making and in everyday life: what’s the difference?
  12. Original Articles
  13. Computerized diagnostic decision support systems – a comparative performance study of Isabel Pro vs. ChatGPT4
  14. Comparative analysis of diagnostic accuracy in endodontic assessments: dental students vs. artificial intelligence
  15. Assessing the Revised Safer Dx Instrument® in the understanding of ambulatory system design changes for type 1 diabetes and autism spectrum disorder in pediatrics
  16. The Big Three diagnostic errors through reflections of Japanese internists
  17. SASAN: ground truth for the effective segmentation and classification of skin cancer using biopsy images
  18. Computable phenotype for diagnostic error: developing the data schema for application of symptom-disease pair analysis of diagnostic error (SPADE)
  19. Development of a disease-based hospital-level diagnostic intensity index
  20. HbA1c and fasting plasma glucose levels are equally related to incident cardiovascular risk in a high CVD risk population without known diabetes
  21. Short Communications
  22. Can ChatGPT-4 evaluate whether a differential diagnosis list contains the correct diagnosis as accurately as a physician?
  23. Analysis of thicknesses of blood collection needle by scanning electron microscopy reveals wide heterogeneity
  24. Letters to the Editor
  25. For any disease a human can imagine, ChatGPT can generate a fake report
  26. The dilemma of epilepsy diagnosis in Pakistan
  27. The Japanese universal health insurance system in the context of diagnostic equity
  28. Case Report – Lessons in Clinical Reasoning
  29. Lessons in clinical reasoning – pitfalls, myths, and pearls: a case of tarsal tunnel syndrome caused by an intraneural ganglion cyst
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