ArticlePloS one2017
Authorship and citation manipulation in academic research.
Article in PloS one, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 45 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
45 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Honorary authorship is highly prevalent in health sciences: systematic review and meta-analysis of surveys.Scientific reports · 2024Pooled it
- The scientific game : Strategic Behavior and Incentives in Science.EMBO reports · 2026Article
- The art of sharing: From research to outreach in the social media era.Experimental physiology · 2026Article
- What's the impact of an impact factor? And why CONJ should stay out of the competition.Canadian oncology nursing journal = Revue canadienne de nursing oncologique · 2026Article
- Article
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- Citation Ethics: An Exploratory Survey of Norms and Behaviors.Journal of academic ethics · 2025Article
- Reforming medical career progression: a call for merit-based systems.Frontiers in medicine · 2025Article
- Volume isn't openness: misaligned assessment and Open Science adoption in Ecuador.Frontiers in research metrics and analytics · 2025Article
- Enhancing equity within the promotions dossier evaluation-Strategies to mitigate biases.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Assessing citation integrity in biomedical publications: corpus annotation and NLP models.Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) · 2024Article
- Article
- Article
- Researchers who agree to manipulate citations are more likely to get their papers published.Nature · 2023Article
- Self-referencing rates in biological disciplines.Frontiers in research metrics and analytics · 2023Article
- Observational
- How scientists interpret and address funding criteria: value creation and undesirable side effects.Small business economics · 2022Article
- Detecting anomalous referencing patterns in PubMed papers suggestive of author-centric reference list manipulation.Scientometrics · 2022Article
- An Ethical Exploration of Increased Average Number of Authors Per Publication.Science and engineering ethics · 2022Article
- The Past, the Present, and the Future: A Bibliometric Analysis of Failed/Fragile/Collapsed State Research During 1990-2020.Frontiers in research metrics and analytics · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Some scholars add authors to their research papers or grant proposals even when those individuals contribute nothing to the research effort. Some journal editors coerce authors to add citations that are not pertinent to their work and some authors pad their reference lists with superfluous citations. How prevalent are these types of manipulation, why do scholars stoop to such practices, and who among us is most susceptible to such ethical lapses? This study builds a framework around how intense competition for limited journal space and research funding can encourage manipulation and then uses that framework to develop hypotheses about who manipulates and why they do so. We test those hypotheses using data from over 12,000 responses to a series of surveys sent to more than 110,000 scholars from eighteen different disciplines spread across science, engineering, social science, business, and health care. We find widespread misattribution in publications and in research proposals with significant variation by academic rank, discipline, sex, publication history, co-authors, etc. Even though the majority of scholars disapprove of such tactics, many feel pressured to make such additions while others suggest that it is just the way the game is played. The findings suggest that certain changes in the review process might help to stem this ethical decline, but progress could be slow.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.