PREDATORY JOURNALS ARE INDEXING IN REPUTED DATABASES: A CASE STUDY OF UNSOLVED ISSUES

The aim of this study is to identify the features of fraudulent journals. Fraudulent and clone journals wasted valuable manuscripts when scholars and authors publish their works in these journals. Fraud journals publish the articles without reviewing process with a high rate of fee while the name and ISSN of clone journals are identical to the original journals. Purposive sampling technique as well as document analysis method have been used to conduct this research. Two clone versions and two fraud journals of the SCOPUS indexing journals have been selected for reviewing their articles. Based on the discussion of this study, researchers found some characteristics of predatory/fraud/ clone journals that will help the scholars to avoid publishing on fake journals.