Deleted Journals

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Gabor Schubert

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Oct 22, 2025, 1:02:01 PM (9 days ago) Oct 22

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Hi,

I noticed that many articles in OpenAlex have a source which is called "Deleted Journal". It has a source ID as the other "normal" journals (https://openalex.org/S4317411217). Actually, currently it is the largest "journal type" source for "article type" publications in OpenAlex (https://openalex.org/works?page=1&filter=type:types/article,primary_location.source.type:source-types/journal&group_by=publication_year,type,authorships.countries,primary_location.source.id,primary_location.source.type):

Deleted Journal: 552 700
ChemInform: 485 200
Proceedings of SPIE: 433 700
Nature: 419 800
BMJ: 372 300

It is followed by ChemInform and the Proceedings of the SPIE (these two are not really traditional journals though), and then by Nature and BMJ.

Unfortunately, it is not clear by whom, why and from where this "Deleted Journal" is deleted. I assume that there is some kind of control at some stage when some sources are marked as deleted in OpenAlex, but it seems that all the documents from these sources are now grouped together to one source. I tried to find some documentation about this, but I haven't found any.

I found cases where the "Deleted Journal" status is probably picked up by other systems downstream causing weird side effects:

1) Google Scholar gives thousands of hits for the search terms "deleted journal" and many of these are publications in venues which are called "Deleted Journal". (https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=%22deleted+journal%22)

2) There are already published journal articles which have "Deleted Journal" as a source in their reference list:

For example https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2024.101134 is an article in the Elsevier journal "Social Sciences & Humanities Open" and has a reference to the following article: "N. Widiyawanti: The importance of setting the classroom learning environment to optimize its function as a learning resource, Deleted Journal, 20 (5s) (2024), pp. 1088-1092" (both in the html and pdf version). This data is even deposited at Crossref :https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1016/j.ssaho.2024.101134

Most probably the authors of the article had the correct journal name (Journal of Electrical Systems) in their original manuscript, but it was changed to "Deleted Journal" sometimes during the publication process, because in the preprint of version of the same article this reference was still to the correct journal: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4896593

The reference has a DOI (https://doi.org/10.52783/jes.2419) which leads to a website which claims to be the "Journal of Electrical Systems": https://www.journal.esrgroups.org/jes/article/view/2419.

This article can be found in OpenAlex and the source is "Deleted Journal": https://api.openalex.org/w4395040892

It is not clear why the journal name was changed in the references, and not even sure that it was taken from OpenAlex, but it is quite probable.

If one looks at this specific article in the "Deleted Journal/Journal of Electrical Systems, other weird things can be seen: In the header of the webpage, it is claimed that this journal is indexed by Scopus and ISI Thomson Reuters (probably Web of Science). Actually, there is a journal with the same name which is indeed indexed by Scopus and Web of Science, but most probably it is another incarnation of Journal of Electrical Systems. According to Scopus and Web of Science there is a journal with the same title which has published a few dozens articles per year since 2005. Most probably the real Journal of Electrical Systems is found here: https://journal.esrgroup.org/jes/ , which is not the same website as the one to where the DOI leads: https://journal.esrgroups.org/jes/ (with an "s" after the "esrgroup"). This seems to be a quite elaborate case of journal hijacking, which is probably known to the original real journal as well, because they have a warning on their homepage "Important Notice: The official and only website of the Journal of Electrical Systems ISSN 1112-5209 JES is https://journal.esrgroup.org/jes/. We do not take responsibility for any other websites claiming to represent us."

It is extra interesting that in this case the hijacked journal uses DOI but the original journal doesn't. So, all the databases easily pick up articles from the fake journal but not from the real one. For instance, Lens.org indexes more than 2500 articles from the fake journal only from the last two years (https://www.lens.org/lens/search/scholar/table?p=0&n=10&preview=false&sourceTitle.must=Journal%20of%20Electrical%20Systems)

Apparently OpenAlex has decided to "delete" both the real and the fake Journal of Electrical Systems, because it gives no hits in the search for sources: https://openalex.org/sources?page=1&filter=default.search:Journal+of+Electrical+Systems

It would be interesting to know what is behind this "Deleted Journal" phenomena. I understand that fake or hijacked journals or other problematic sources should be "deleted" from the database, but without proper documentation/explanation it might raise some questions. And it might even lead to deletion of legitimate sources.