Do hijacked journals attract dishonest authors?

This research in progress studies academic misconduct as it related to hijacked journals. There is a common belief in the literature that naive authors submit papers to fake journals. This study demonstrates that there is a group of dishonest authors who are attracted by the fast publication with no peer review process that is offered by hijacked journals. The results show that the average share of plagiarism in an examined sample of 500 papers was 21.0%. Plagiarism was not detected only in 28.2% of the papers. These results raise concerns not only about cyber-criminals but also about authors who exploit hijacked journals to improve their publication records.