@MyriamErtz, I am relatively new to the academic community having only completed my doctoral studies recently. However, in my research, which was about business ethics, I have come across literature that discussed fraudulent activities in certain circles of the academic community. In one instance I actually had a personal experience where I asked a lecturer at a university and author of published literature to participate in my study to which she replied something like "What's in it for me?". It is clear that when money is involved, these things happen, which is a sorry state of affairs. Your endeauvours in this regard must be complimented.

Hello Myriam Ertz

I am equally bemused by this behaviour. I wonder - do you have any idea, or does anyone else have any experience - how much money is involved - ie cost per citation. After all. as Johann Pieterse says, it's the financial motivation/details. And out of interest, are the articles related to the topic at all?

Indeed, this seems to be a new level of scientific misconduct. I will add this discussion to my collection of ResearchGate discussions about different kinds of scientific misconduct:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_big_of_a_problem_is_scientific_misconduct

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Lets_talk_about_some_bad_practices_in_Research

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Do_you_know_what_a_paper_mill_is

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Fraud_by_Numbers_Metrics_and_the_New_Academic_Misconduct

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Are_federal_funding_agencies_insensitive_to_data_fabrication

https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_to_address_academic_dishonesty_and_pressures_to_complete_PhD

https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_action_can_you_take_against_someone_who_has_published_an_article_in_a_journal_but_did_not_give_you_a_rightful_authorship

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_there_any_one_to_defend_Honorary_forced_authorship_if_not_why_we_practice_it

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Papers_from_research_work

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_it_morally_right_or_wrong_for_reviewers_to_propose_articles_unrelated_to_your_work_for_you_to_cite

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Have_you_ever_felt_pressured_by_peer_reviewers_to_cite_seemingly_superfluous_studies_in_your_work

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Unethical_act_of_Reviewer

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Unethical_ways_to_increase_citation

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Can_plagiarism_be_completely_prevented_in_the_academic_world_If_you_think_it_can_or_cannot_be_blocked_Why

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Academic_Fraud_beyond_FFP_Yes_No_or_Anything_Else

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Research_Ethics_in_Publishing

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Can_open_science_decrease_scientific_misconduct

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Unethical_behaviour_in_research_publications

https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_can_the_research_community_detect_and_filter_Balloon_Professors_who_use_their_students_as_their_ladders_without_any_contribution

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?

The findings suggest that certain changes in the review process might help to stem this ethical decline, but progress could be slow.

Article Authorship and citation manipulation in academic research

Ljubomir Jacić has drawn my attention to the fact that "this type of scientific misconduct is not so rare, and it was already treated in this discussion room" (https://www.researchgate.net/post/Lets_talk_about_some_bad_practices_in_Research/68).

Dear all,

Thanks for your replies and for the additional discussions. I think the more discussions there are on these topics the better. Guess what I received just after publishing the discussion?

Dear Professor!

to greet!

Sorry to bother you!

I want to publish some papers in economic or management journals. Can you help me? I can provide a thank you fee!

For example, I will give you a $2000 thank you fee for helping me write articles. For example, if you add my name to your article, I will give you a $1000 thank you fee.

I know this email is presumptuous, but my friends and I need to publish dozens of papers every year. If you can help me, we can cooperate for a long time. I'm not kidding, I'm very sincere!

If you are offended, please forgive me!

Look forward to your reply!

Warmly Wishes,

Zahid Haans

This is getting absolutely out of control - kidding or not. Kind regards,

OMG, am totally shocked! also badly saddened as the shameless inviter is likely to be a Chinese based in the mainland of China, telling from the revealed mobile number. BTW, China is the most prolific contributor of retracted publications in the world according to the retraction data archived by the Retraction Watch. Am a Chinese researcher working on the topic of retraction. Feeling too bad!!!

Shaoxiong Brian Xu

I'm just curious about the situation in China, the motto publish or perish is well known but I feel that in China the pressure  is  more so.

I have observed that some people get hundreds of citations a month when their research is seems to me to be a dust collection quality and only they started in the field.  Is there a scheme to get so many citations that you aware of?

Shaoxiong Brian Xu

thank you for your answer. This is another point why the citation correlation sometime is skewed to indicate on the quality of researcher work. This issue is remotely relate to the topic at hand, hence one should look at the statement that appear in some articles of what every each author contributed. I added this statement to several of my papers.

To the point of paying for article, it also done in USA but not so obviously.

I guess that one should also look closely to the western citation rings/societies camouflaged under various names(usually research group for something) but finally working under the umbrella of huge financial interests. The chinese example is just a small part of the financially driven citation mechanism which developed worldwide: citations are monetized by the metrics, publishing and educational business entities and also used by the authors which are forced to fulfill some objectives established by a wrongly constructed research environment.

This is a mere misconduct in academia. I also received such emails. We need to be more careful.

Related research question:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Authorss_citation_cartel-Anyone_seen_or_heard_about_it

A reverse offer - pay to be cited: https://www.researchgate.net/post/Recitations_On_Sale_What_the_hell_we_are_going

Paper with authorship posted for sale retracted over a year after Retraction Watch report

More than a year after we reported on two websites advertising authorships of scientific papers for sale, one of the posted articles has been retracted, while publishers say they are still investigating others....

https://retractionwatch.com/2023/02/13/paper-with-authorship-posted-for-sale-retracted-over-a-year-after-retraction-watch-report/

More on Self-Correcting Science and Replications: A Critical Review

There is no silver bullet when it comes to identifying the citation effect of failed replications...

First, while all the studies have shortcomings, they collectively provide some insight into the relationship between replications and citations...

Second, while the evidence to date appears to indicate that neither psychology or economics is self-correcting when it comes to failed replications, there is room for more work to be done. This is, after all, an important question...

https://replicationnetwork.com/2023/04/16/reed-more-on-self-correcting-science-and-replications-a-critical-review/

An editor of a fairly well known journal once provided that just to consider the submitted article, the base line was citing two of the editor's references. A person working for a fairly well known 'research organization' demanded for co-authorship as 'payment' for enabling a publication to be published under the logo of such a 'research organization'. Note this, as i understood at the time, 2007, was common practice of this person, and is still on-going in 2023!!!!!!!!...a good 16 years onwards.......

UNSOLICITED SOLICITATIONS: IDENTIFYING CHARACTERISTICS OF UNSOLICITED EMAILS FROM POTENTIALLY PREDATORY JOURNALS AND THE ROLE OF LIBRARIANS

This commentary provides a succinct overview of predatory journals; briefly describes the problem of predatory journal email solicitations; explains the role librarians can play in their identification; and lists some red flags and tactics librarians can tell researchers to look out for, as informed by the literature and the author's analysis of 60 unsolicited journal emails she received in her own institutional inbox...

https://jmla.pitt.edu/ojs/jmla/article/view/1554

All,

My experience with this is that it is not a scam but a method to introduce malware for further harvesting of information. Last week I spent about half an hour being entertained by a chatter bot using catfishing on LinkedIn trying to lure me into providing access to Wechat /WhatsApp . The account was fake and the inconsistencies in dealing with the information I provided was a clear indication of a chatter bot. also, since we were chatting on LinkedIn the objective was not to immediately scam me but to gain entry via an exploit in those platforms. It was very entertaining and interesting to see the effort put into the system to try to lure me into giving away information!

In any case: do not give the information to the message or bot

Researchers who agree to editors’ demands to add citations to their papers are more likely to get their work published. We asked readers how they feel about ‘citation padding’. The majority say that scientists shouldn’t engage in any kind of citation manipulation. But almost 40% of readers think that it’s fine to add a reference occasionally, as long as it’s relevant to the paper...

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01532-w

I had no idea that this took place. I was very disappointed. It's so lovely when you find out about another bona fide citation of your work and to think this has been going on. I would never take part in any citation manipulation and would hate it if I thought that I had been involved with it.

Fine editorial: Impact or Perish, Gaming the Metrics and Goodhart’s Law

It is believed that misconduct in publishing is an offshoot of the “publish or perish” culture. The desperation to publish to retain tenure and advance in academia spawned a number of unethical practices such as data fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, salami publications, gift authorship, ghost authorship, and so on.

However, the rat race in research is gradually pushing the envelope beyond “publish or perish” and toward “impact or perish.” The stakes are high. Mere publications are not enough. To rise above the riff-raff in the academic world, one has to publish beyond numbers and toward impact, the latter measured by questionable and often misused metrics...

https://journals.lww.com/mjdy/fulltext/2023/16002/impact_or_perish,_gaming_the_metrics_and.1.aspx

In their book, Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science, William Broad and Nicholas Wade (1982) argued that the conventional wisdom that science is a strictly logical process, with objectivity the essence of scientist's attitudes…, is a mythical ideal.

“Our conclusion, in brief, is that science bears little resemblance to its conventional portrait. We believe that the logical structure discernible in scientific knowledge says nothing about the process by which the structure was built or the mentality of the builders. In the acquisition of knowledge, scientists are not guided by logic and objectivity alone, but also by such nonrational factors as rhetoric, propaganda, and personal prejudice. Scientists do not depend solely on rational thought, and have no monopoly on it.”

With the tyranny of scientism and the liquidity of postmodernism; science and academia should always be approached with scepticisme.

This is about service for citation manipulation, give and get!

"Citation exchange service. One can earn scicoins by citing others' papers and use them to request citations to his/her own scientific work"

https://scicite.com/howuse

https://twitter.com/AbalkinaAnna/status/1745552050870534283