Early this year, Anna Abalkina found out that her name was on a watch list for Roskomnadzor, a Russian agency that tracks online and social-media activity. Abalkina, a Russian citizen now working in Berlin, tries not to worry about it. There shouldn’t be a risk if she were to return to Russia, she reasons. “But the problem is, you never know.” Her colleagues advise against it.
The reason that she has come under the watchful eye of the Russian state is that she has spent 13 years rooting out fraud in the scientific literature. Her work on plagiarism and on uncovering businesses that sell fake papers — called paper mills — has focused most heavily on Russia and ex-Soviet countries, and more recently on Iran and India.
Globally, she’s also tracked hijacked journals, which are scam websites that clone authentic journal titles to con authors out of publication fees. Abalkina showed that the hijackers launder their way into respectability by becoming indexed in research databases such as Scopus. Last December, Scopus’s owner Elsevier deleted all of its links to journal home pages to counteract the problem — acknowledging Abalkina’s work. But this June, she reported that several hijacked journals continue to infiltrate Scopus.
“Cases of journal hijacking can be complex and ever-changing,” a spokesperson for Elsevier said, adding that the publisher was continually adjusting its processes so that Scopus indexed only high-quality, trusted content.
Then, this November, Abalkina flagged an unusually bold effort to clone journal sites from major publishers. They say they’re looking into the scam.
Abalkina is one of a growing cohort of sleuths working to decontaminate the literature. But she’s unusual in studying activity in Russia, in being funded to do some of this work — at the Free University of Berlin’s Institute of East European Studies — and in her focus on how fraud systems operate.
“She has considerable skills in doing the sorts of analyses that allow her to explore networks of people,” says Dorothy Bishop, a neuropsychologist at the University of Oxford, UK, who collaborated with Abalkina to document a paper mill that got six illegitimate papers published in a psychology journal (which were subsequently retracted). “She is doing very important work,” Bishop adds.
