Фото: БГУ
A clone of the Belarusian State University (BSU) history journal has appeared online, the university’s press service said.
The website has been operating for several months. It copies information from the authentic BSU journal. The fake version contains genuine archives of articles from 2017 to mid-2025. However, subsequent issues have been compromised. They include articles by non-existent authors, generated using artificial intelligence to manipulate citation metrics, as well as works by real scholars who mistakenly paid for publication in the clone journal.
The university said the emergence of such a site was linked to the original journal receiving the highest Q1 ranking in the Scopus database journal rankings.
Publishing an article in a genuine Scopus-listed journal is not easy, which creates demand for clone publications.
“Fraudsters derive commercial profit from implementing such schemes, while unscrupulous authors can, for a fee, increase their citation rates and theoretically even secure indexing of their articles in Scopus and other authoritative databases”, said Uladzimir Kulazhenka, director of the BSU Fundamental Library.
BSU is taking measures to eliminate the clone.