In the article "Citation manipulation through citation mills and pre-print servers" published on February 14, 2025 Hazem Ibrahim, Fengyuan Liu, Yasir Zaki та Talal Rahwan examined the 114 authors in their dataset whose Google Scholar profiles exhibit highly irregular patterns, and found that they received citations from non-peer reviewed sources more frequently than regular authors. "More specifically, we find that pre-print servers, namely, arXiv, Authorea, OSF, and ResearchGate accounted for a sizable proportion of their non-self citations received" – scientists write.
Having established that pre-print servers can be abused for the purpose of citation manipulation, and that all of the authors received an excessive number of citations from a small number of papers, authors investigate whether any of these citations could be possibly purchased. It was identified a ResearchGate account which provides many superfluous citations to anomalous author. Further examination revealed that this particular account is affiliated with a website offering a so-called "H-index & Citations Booster".
The citation purchasing service that we highlight in this study is closely related to other forms of academic misconduct, such as predatory publishing and paper mills. For example, four out of five papers that supplied the purchased citations were all published in the same "Special Issue" of a journal which primarily publishes work related to Chemistry. However, the papers authored by the fictional author were on the topic of "fake news", and were cited by papers discussing political issues surrounding fake news.
More: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-88709-7#MOESM1
