The documented hijacking of a legitimate academic journal earlier this year shows how the pressure on researchers to publish, combined with the proliferation and development of AI technology, is threatening to undermine trust in research and is even derailing the careers of affected academics.
In a recent article, “The ‘hijacking’ of the Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems: Implications for the information systems community” authors Sune Dueholm Müller and Johan Ivar Sæb, lay out several reasons for arguing that the pressure on researchers to publish, combined with the proliferation and development of AI technology, can contribute to journal hijacking becoming an even greater threat.
The proliferation of fake articles and fake journals makes search engines like Google Scholar unreliable. These fakes also threaten to undermine hiring and promotion procedures because candidates may have their names attached to either non-existent articles or to ones they did not write.
Further, Müller and Sæbø note: “Fake articles may also have a negative impact on the responses returned by AI-powered chatbots, such as ChatGPT, and lead to even more instances of ‘hallucination’ [when a chatbot returns ‘nonsense’ in response to a properly phrased prompt].”
