publication ethics

 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.

 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.

 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.

 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.

 Hijacked journals are journals managed by cybercriminals that mimic the original journal and publish manuscripts without peer review, charging a fee to the author. Although there is literature on hijacked journals, there is a gap in the content of published papers in the hijacked journals. This study aims to analyze the content of published papers in hijacked journals to assess their alignment with various Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

 About 21 medicine journals have been investigated and about 3300 published manuscripts in them analyzed in terms of SDGs using the text-based analyzing method.

 The findings indicated that published manuscripts fit in the categories of SDG 01, SDG 03, SDG 11, and SDG 16 where SDG-03 is most dominant.

 The awareness about the problem of hijacked journals is critical, especially for developing countries, to eliminate the negative effects of these journals. It is the first research that discusses the negative effect of hijacked journals by considering SDGs and sheds light on the phenomenon.

The surge in fast food consumption in recent years is considered a threat to human health. This change in the life habit has raised serious concerns among health policy-makers and medical nutrition researchers. Environmental stress, multitasking, low physical activity, and low academic achievement have been shown to influence the predilection for consuming fast food.1 We have now faced with one similarly threatening phenomenon among university students and academics, which can be termed “fast research”.

In the last issue of the Journal of Paramedical Sciences, Abbasiyan, et al in their Original Article “Do the editors-in-chief of Iranian medical journals have a good knowledge, attitude and practice of plagiarism” showed that the knowledge, attitude, and the practice (KAP) of the chief editors of scholarly journals in Iranian Medical Universities located in the capital city is in high and favorable level (1.58 out of 2) [1]. I would like to discuss the probable false messages of such articles for science ethical managers in the country. For some years, every several-months or several-years a scholarly paper or news has been published to show the ethics situation of academic researches or publication ethics in Iran periodically [2-5]. Some Iranian scientists think these reports are unfair [6], and some non-Iranian reporters named it a scandal [7] ; and yet, facts demonstrate little improvements with regards to ethical situation compared with the past. I believe that accepting the already existing problems is the first step for resolving them. Although I agree with Ataie-Ashtiani [8] and others who think that some magnifications have been made on the special case of IR Iran, as Farrokhi stated, unfortunately there are some problems including the presence of misconduct and also unawareness about how to explain and excuse when a mistake is discovered [9]. As I mentioned before, although there are some defects in our laws regarding managing academic dishonesty [10], there are also other regulations and newly approved rules [11] for such issues. Such hopeful studies [1] and laws [11] shows some attainments, while I still think it is essential to create a national organization to evaluate and disclose all cases of scientific misconduct and frauds and declare their punishments publicly. If such an organization to monitor and evaluate the integrity of researches exists, it should have clear equitable strategy to approach similar cases with different scientific degrees or other types of official power or position. As stated previously, although there are some defects in our laws to manage academic dishonesty [10], there are also other regulations and newly approved rules [11] to accomplish.

On November 1st
2016, Springer Nature announced that Springer and BioMed Central are retracting 58 articles published by Iran-based authors across seven journals. The decision was made after thorough investigation following receiving allegations of plagiarism, peer review, and authorship manipulation in an effort to mislead the review system (1, 2). Not all papers were involved with all of the above issues, but each showed the evidence of at least one of these issues. At this time, we are not able to comment on the involvement of each individual author, but this has already added a black sheath to his or her records....

Ethical misconduct is not a new issue in the history of science and literature. However, ethical misconducts in science have grown considerably in the modern era which is due to emphasis on the scientific proliferation in research institutes and gauging scientists according to their publications. In the current case series, several misconducts occurring over the previous years in Mashhad University of Medical Sciences (Mashhad, Iran) either for Journals or Faculty members were gathered and specific recommendations were provided to avoid similar events in the future. All recommendations are according to Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).