Abstract
The current status of academic publishing is worrying. Cybercriminals are now targeting academic audiences, making it necessary to inform both editors and authors about such issues. The latest involves bogus impact factors, which are challenging scholarly publishing. Legitimate impact factors are used by authors and editors to get a general idea of the audience, if any, for a particular piece or journal. The bogus metrics only add confusion in support of the cybercrimes of their initiators. In this paper, we discuss bogus impact factors, victim countries, and try to clarify the phenomena for both authors and editors.
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Authors note Our goal is to increase the quality of academic publishing, helping journals to improve themselves. We do not want to challenge legitimate academic journals, scientific databases, or scientific social networks. Our data may change due to updating of the related databases (such as Alexa), advanced techniques used by cybercriminals, and those who would expose them.
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Dadkhah, M., Borchardt, G., Lagzian, M. et al. Academic Journals Plagued by Bogus Impact Factors. Pub Res Q 33, 183–187 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-017-9509-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-017-9509-4