So, there is no doubt about the logic behind launching the fake impact factor service “UIF”. The South Asian publishing house behind the UIF also is involved in selecting topics and writing theses for postgraduate students. Among the distinguished and novel services that publishing house offered the academic world were, I would have to say, numerous “academic pain relieving services” with mottos and advertisements that included “Publish your book in America,” “We write your books in 15 minutes and publish it in USA,” “Publish your book with international ISBN,” “We start your journal from A–Z,” “We build editorial team for your journal,” “We index your journal in Impact factor companies” (which I assumed would be GIF, UIF, and some of the other fake metrics). , a publishing service provider in the south Asian country in July 2013. The domain “ ” was registered by Assistant Professor Dr. There is an interesting story associated with the fake metric identified as the Universal Impact Factor (UIF) ( 6). Many other cybercriminals behind the hijacked journals have used exactly the same service, i.e., “ ,” including the cybercriminals behind Afinidad journal ( ), Wulfenia journal ( ), Textile journal ( ), Cahiers de Paiolive ( ), GAIA-ATHENS Journal (gix.info and ), The Veliger ( ), and GMP Review ( euromed.uk.com). GIF has even gone to the extent of overtly collecting evaluation fees using Paypal, which made it easy to identify who was running this fake company even though he tried to hide his identity using “ ” on the same day he registered the domain “ ”. These three fake metrics were among the most reputable fake metrics in the world of academic publishing, and my use of the word “reputable” to describe them means that there are their logos and metrics appeared on the homepage of many journals, including high-quality, peer-reviewed journals published by universities and in some other journals with low or questionable quality. Then, in 2013, the bogus Citefactor and Universal Impact Factor (UIF) were introduced to the academic world by cybercriminals on June 27 and July 11, respectively. The invisible founder of GIF is also actively spamming the several academic forums such as “Researchgate” to discuss the advantages of the fake metric “GIF” over other metrics and broadcasting a lot of nonsense and lies against the Thomson Reuter’s Impact factor and Index Copernicus metric value (ICV). , using the phone number and address in the South Asian country. The Global Impact Factor (GIF) was among the first fake metrics ( 6), and it first appeared on the scene Octoby the invisible cybercriminal whom I identified to be Mr. The purpose of this article is to provide some more detailed information concerning how some of the fake impact factors and metrics came into existence and infected the world of academic publishing. Indeed those impact factors were bogus metrics that were introduced to the academic world by fake companies that were not registered anywhere by anyone ( 7). However, the sad story continued, and in, August 2013, I detected and reported five fake impact factor companies that claimed to calculate impact factors for scientific journals ( 6). These journals had convincing sounding names, such as the Science Record Journals, the Thomas Publications Journals (Thomaspub), and the Recent Science journals. The next phenomenon was the outbreak of fake publishers whose journals never appeared anywhere ( 1). Subsequently, the phenomenon of hijacked journals came into existence in October 2011, and I detected it in early 2012 ( 1, 3– 5). Later, fake conferences were scheduled and money was collected from authors, but the conferences never occurred ( 1, 2). During the last decade, the world of academic research and publication was attacked by low quality and commercial journals that mimic the peer-reviewed scientific journals that I call this phenomenon “questionable journals” ( 1).
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