Breaking free from academic scams: Five key reflections on the cloned journal conundrum

Key points Emerging as a novel cybercrime, cloned (or hijacked) journals with identical ISSNs to legitimate ones have surfaced. These cloned journals employ various tactics, and this article identifies and discusses the top five. Fraudulent journals primarily focus on print‐only publications, using parallel websites to mislead researchers. Cloned journals are using videos on their homepages to deceitfully showcase indexing in databases like Scopus or Web of Science.