Identifying undetected hijacked journals in medical science: a linkage analysis

The growing threat of hijacked journals poses a significant challenge to the integrity of academic publishing. As an accurate scale of the issue remains unknown, practical methods for detecting previously unidentified hijacked journals are critically needed. This study employs a linkage analysis to investigate the outbound links of six known hijacked medical journals. The analysis successfully uncovered four additional suspected hijacked journals, demonstrating that analyzing their linkage structure can effectively map out their networks and lead to the detection of new ones. Our findings highlight the value of this method in expanding the current blocklist of detected hijacked journals and mitigating their harmful impact on scholarly communication. It appears that the same hijacker(s) may be responsible for the network of hijacked journals, and any approach to bulk analyze these journals could help detect new ones.