Unfortunately, during the last decade or so the number of citations has acquired a fetish status, both for journals (impact factors) and for individuals (h index etc.). The reason is that people are trying to find simple foundations for decisions in a complex world (decisions which journal to choose for publication, whom to hire, ...). Many institutions look at numbers derived from the number of citations of individuals to make decisions. The assumption is that the number of citations is equivalent to quality of research. This tendency leads also to attempts to manipulate the number of citations as in the cases you described. See these discussion on more about this problem:

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

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

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

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

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

https://www.researchgate.net/post/How-can-you-judge-on-an-article-whether-it-is-good-or-not

https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_to_quantitatively_assess_the_quality_of_a_peer-reviewed_publication

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

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Does-Journal-Impact-Factor-Really-Matter

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

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

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

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

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

https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_Citation_can_be_increased_in_view_of_h-Statistics_for_a_Scholarly_article

Hi Dr Milan Tripathi . See the link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/145797

See the following link: https://www.enago.com/academy/what-is-value-of-citation-metrics/

See the following RG link: Article What Is a Citation Worth

Also see the following link: https://www.natureindex.com/news-blog/reading-between-the-lines-on-citation-value

Kindly see also the following link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.06088

If you are applying to a particular Journal and you have no reference in your paper of that Journal, maybe you should change the Journal, because it does not have papers similar to yours.

Hi,

Actually, this is always done by the reviewers, who recommend their articles to be cited.