Unmasking Deceptive Scholarship: A Comparative Altmetric Analysis of Non-cloned and Cloned Journals

The present study employed an altmetric approach to compare the web attention and social media engagement of non-cloned and cloned journals. The primary objective was to assess whether social media metrics could distinguish between legitimate and hijacked journals. Altmetric Explorer was used to track social media engagement of 194 non-cloned journals and their cloned counterparts identified from the UGC Consortium for Academics and Research Ethics (UGC-CARE) List. The altmetric data were further analysed using Jamovi version 2.6.44 and MS Excel. The study found that, unlike 78 non-cloned journals, only three cloned journals had social media engagement. In contrast to non-cloned journals, which received online attention across 16 platforms, the cloned journals received mentions on only three platforms. The Mann-Whitney test revealed a significant difference in Dimension Citation (DC) and Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) between the cloned and non-cloned journals. Moreover, Gini coefficients were 0.63 for cloned and 0.71 for non-cloned journals, indicating inequality in AAS between the two groups. A weak positive correlation between AAS and DC was observed for non-cloned journals (rho=0.08, p<0.001), whereas a strong positive correlation was noticed for cloned journals (rho=0.75, p<0.001). The study's findings imply that altmetrics can be an essential tool for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate journals by highlighting distinct patterns of social media engagement and scholarly impact.