The shocking story of fake journal impact factors and bogus journals

During the last decade, the world of academic research and publication was attacked by low quality and commercial

journals that mimic the peer-reviewed scientific journals that I call this phenomenon “questionable journals” .

Later, fake conferences were scheduled and money was collected from authors, but the conferences never occurred

. Subsequently, the phenomenon of hijacked journals came into existence in October 2011, and I detected it in

early 2012 . The next phenomenon was the outbreak of fake publishers whose journals never appeared

anywhere . These journals had convincing sounding names, such as the Science Record Journals, the Thomas

Publications Journals (Thomaspub), and the Recent Science journals. However, the sad story continued, and in,

August 2013, I detected and reported five fake impact factor companies that claimed to calculate impact factors for

scientific journals. Indeed those impact factors were bogus metrics that were introduced to the academic world

by fake companies that were not registered anywhere by anyone. The purpose of this article is to provide some

more detailed information concerning how some of the fake impact factors and metrics came into existence and

infected the world of academic publishing.

Mehrdad Jalalian