ArticleScientific reports2025
Citation manipulation through citation mills and pre-print servers.
Article in Scientific reports, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Challenges of Scientific Publishing: An Editor-In-Chief's Perspective.Fundamental & clinical pharmacology · 2026Article
- Altmetric Activity and Scientific Integrity: A Retraction Analysis of PubMed-Indexed Social Media-Related Publications.Journal of Korean medical science · 2026Article
- Machine learning based screening of potential paper mill publications in cancer research: methodological and cross sectional study.BMJ (Clinical research ed.) · 2026Article
- Reply to Singer: Strike paper mills at the root.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Citations are widely considered in scientists' evaluation. As such, scientists may be incentivized to inflate their citation counts. While previous literature has examined self-citations and citation cartels, it remains unclear whether scientists can purchase citations. Here, we compile a dataset of ~1.6 million profiles on Google Scholar to examine instances of citation fraud on the platform. We survey faculty at highly-ranked universities, and confirm that Google Scholar is widely used when evaluating scientists. We then engage with a citation-boosting service, and manage to purchase 50 citations while assuming the identity of a fictional author. Taken as a whole, our findings bring to light new forms of citation manipulation, and emphasize the need to look beyond citation counts.
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.