The story of fake impact factor companies and how we detected them

Beginning about three years ago, the world of academic publishing has become infected by fake impact factors and misleading metrics that are launched by bogus companies. The misleading metrics and fake impact factors have damaged the prestige and reliability of scientific research and scholarly journals. This article presents the in-depth story of some of the main bogus impact factors, how they approached the academic world, and how the author identified them. Some names that they use are Universal Impact Factor (UIF), Global Impact Factor (GIF), and Citefactor, and there even is a fake Thomson Reuters Company.