A Decade in Hijacked Journals: What Will be the Future Trend?

Abstract

Purpose: Hijacked journals are fraudulent websites that mimic legitimate journals and, by charging authors, publish manuscripts. The current editorial endeavors to provide a close view of current literature. This editorial piece analyzes 10 years of research on hijacked journals and endeavors to shed light on future trends.

Methods: Current research uses a bibliometric approach to analyze data and discuss results. The OpenAlex has been used for data collection. Some of the data analysis was conducted using OpenAlex. The other study was done using Bibliometrix, and the date is limited to publication between 2014 and 2024.

Results: The findings provide a close view of the published literature in terms of access type, growth, topics, most frequent words, country contribution, top publishers, and alignment of literature with sustainable development goals.

Conclusion: The gap in current literature is the limitation in easily usable methods to be accessible by all researchers for hijacked journal detection and data analysis. The use of artificial intelligence can be promising.