Retraction Watch readers are likely familiar with Clarivate’s Highly Cited Researcher (HCR) designation, awarded to “who have demonstrated a disproportionate level of significant and broad influence in their field or fields of research.” And they might also recall that researchers whose work has come under significant scrutiny — or even retracted — can sometimes show up on that list.
As of this year, that is less likely to happen, thanks to a change Clarivate announced today along with the list of nearly 7,000 HCRs:
This year Clarivate partnered with Retraction Watch and extended the qualitative analysis of the Highly Cited Researchers list, addressing increasing concerns over potential misconduct (such as plagiarism, image manipulation, fake peer review). With the assistance of Retraction Watch and its unparalleled database of retractions, Clarivate analysts searched for evidence of misconduct in all publications of those on the preliminary list of Highly Cited Researchers. Researchers found to have committed scientific misconduct in formal proceedings conducted by a researcher’s institution, a government agency, a funder or a publisher are excluded from the list of Highly Cited Researchers.
We asked Gali Halevi, director of the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate, to answer a few questions about the change.
What prompted Clarivate to add a check for potential misconduct among Highly Cited Researchers this year?
In recent years we have felt the need to deepen our qualitative analysis behind the creation of the annual Highly Cited Researchers list, in an effort to navigate what appears to us to be increasing levels of research misconduct in the academic community as a whole.
The incentives to achieve Highly Cited Researcher status are in some nations and research systems quite high. This status often results in rewards for a researcher – respect, promotion, recruitment and financial bonus rewards are all commonplace. Not only are the personal rewards high, but institutional pressure is high to enter or remain on the list. Unfortunately, this results in a very small number of researchers using more ingenious gaming methods every year in order to be included.
In 2019 we began to exclude authors whose collection of highly cited papers revealed unusually high levels of self-citation. Inordinate self-citation and unusual collaborative group citation (citation circles or cabals) can seriously undermine the validity of the data analyzed for Highly Cited Researchers. These activities may represent efforts to game the system and create self-generated status.
Unfortunately, it appears to us that such activity is increasing, which warrants increased vigilance on our side in creating a list which accurately reflects genuine, community-wide research influence.
Can you estimate how many potential Highly Cited Researchers were flagged by the checks?
With the implementation of more filters this year, the number of potential Highly Cited Researcher candidates excluded from our final list increased from some 300 in 2021 to about 550 in 2022.
It is worrying to think that in a few years perhaps up to 10% of those we are identifying through our algorithms may be engaged in publication and citation gaming or misconduct – which is all the more reason to set up proper methods for identifying such behavior now, and to raise awareness of these issues so others within the community can take necessary action as well.
Were there particular kinds of misconduct that showed up more often in the checks?
Common types of misconduct include plagiarism, fabrications of data or findings, data or image manipulation, false reporting of results, and extreme self-citation.
We have always excluded retracted highly cited papers from our analysis. This year we also used the Retraction Watch database to look for retractions for reasons of misconduct among an author’s publications that were not highly cited. (It is important to note that some retractions are the result of publishing errors or corrections, so we did not consider these as evidence for exclusion in our deeper level of analysis.) This proved useful for identifying researchers to exclude from our list, and we will continue with this procedure in the future.
We have noted more ingenious gaming methods lately that require greater scrutiny of the publication and citation records of putative Highly Cited Researchers. For example, outsized output, in which individuals publish two or three papers per week over long periods, by relying on international networks of co-authors, raise the possibility that an individual’s high citation counts may result from co-authors alone when publishing without the individual in question. If more than half of a researcher’s citations derive from co-authors, for example, we consider this narrow rather than community-wide influence, and that is not the type of evidence we look for in naming Highly Cited Researchers. Any author publishing two or three papers per week strains our understanding of the normative standards of authorship and credit.
Do you think that knowing Clarivate will be checking for evidence of misconduct could deter researchers from certain kinds of behavior that might increase their citations artificially?
Our analysts use many different filters to identify and exclude researchers whose publication and citation activity is unusual and suspect. We will not enumerate all the checks and filters being deployed in the interest of staying ahead of those attempting to game our identification of Highly Cited Researchers.
We hope this increased vigilance will deter some people, but in reality the issue is systemic and growing, from our perspective. Retraction Watch itself has lately reported how some publishers have uncovered schemes that require hundreds of retractions for specific titles. This then is an explicit call for the research community to police itself through more thorough peer review and other internationally recognized procedures to ensure integrity in research and its publication.
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].
It’s a start.
However, I just browsed the 2022 list in my area of technical expertise, “Mathematics” and “Engineering”, and I immediately saw well-known citation-authorship-ring names. Just to get you started, check the authors and interconnections related to “China Medical University Taiwan” in the “Mathematics” category, and ask yourselves how can a generally unknown medical school in Taiwan produce 10 people on the list, most in the “hard” science (in which the university has no programs, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Medical_University_(Taiwan) ) , and only 1 of whom might be related to medicine?
So while some of the most egregious individuals (who adorn the pages of RetractionWatch too, like “Atangana”) have been caught, many others (even ones related to the egregious individuals) are still on the list. Ultimately data analytics may not be the way to select people for impact, expert opinion is needed to distinguish people gaming the metrics from those positively contributing to the scientific enterprise.
I do appreciate the frank discussion by Clarivate on this very serious matter. The matter deserves a lot of attention, given how institutions and individuals hawk these listings for personal and professional gain.
At a glance, the listings under mathematics appear worse than useless, and one would think they would be negatively correlated with other measures. There might in principle be disciplines where this sort of measurement has relevance. But perhaps not in the current state of publishing.
Generating numbers when you don’t have useful data is not helpful. “You can’t get there from here.” And Goodhart’s law is generally applicable.
I agree. The more I look at it, the worse it gets. Most names listed involve work of no recognition by experts in the field and little impact, but it is well cited because it’s not hard to manipulate citations these days. Goodwin’s law in full effect.
Oops, Goodhart’s law*. 🙂
Hard agree. Being somehow familiar with the field of mathematics, I somehow recognize exactly zero of the listed persons, out of nearly 60. Except those whom I recognize as crooks, that is.
Many researchers who have boosted their citations by publishing reviews on Covid-19 after 2020 have also made to this list somehow.
Surprisingly, they had very few citations before 2020 and its amazing that how they have been selected just based on inflated citations after outbreak of Covid.
Really difficult to understand such narrow range for selecting people in this list.
In my opinion, the entire concept of highly cited researchers is inherently worthless. It’s just some nonsense metric Clarivate made up to get some attention for their company.
Highly Cited Researcher means the researcher’s papers have got several citations. There is no more meaning.
You put a magical meaning on the list of members. Maybe they published the wrong results, which is why they were cited so highly.
China Medical University offers a visiting professor position for the members of Hi-Ci.
So, what is the problem?
If you find something “misconduct” as a researcher, write an ERRATA.
What is your motivation?
What is your problem with the list of the Clarivate Analysis?
I think all the researchers on the HCR list should apologize to make this angry audience of “scholars” happy. And that’s not enough, they should publish a declaration and ask that their articles not be cited.
Should an accident occur in traffic, should all vehicles be banned from traffic? Indeed, a few people may have tried to cheat, but does that give you the right to impeach everyone?
It’s called LINCH!
Gali Halevi and Clarivate, who disrespect people’s personal rights, and Retractwatch should apologize for publishing these unproven accusations.
PS:
If they have an honest and reasonable argument, they would conduct with the corresponding person and ask for an explanation. Even, they blame the researcher since they used “yahoo” or “gmail”
First ask, why some authors prefers YAHOO or GMAIL?
and then accuse…blame..
Need examples of how many holes there are in the Clarivate system? I have some.
– Luque, Rafael.
Clarivate profile: https://www.webofscience.com/wos/author/record/5083
PubPeer record (incomplete due to variable name spelling): https://pubpeer.com/search?q=authors%3A%22rafael+luque%22
– Li, Changhe.
Clarivate profile: https://www.webofscience.com/wos/author/record/1947906
Record of irrelevant citations received (incomplete due to absence of a key phrase in some instances): https://pubpeer.com/search?q=%22certain+c+li%22
– Ali, Hafiz Muhammad.
Clarivate profile: https://www.webofscience.com/wos/author/record/2224522
Example of skewed citation pattern: https://app.dimensions.ai/discover/publication?or_subset_publication_citations=pub.1140352230 (citations to DOI 10.1016/j.jclepro.2021.128573: 37 of 127 come from a single Journal of Energy Storage, well ahead of Journal of Building Engineering at 12).
– Griffiths, Mark D.
Clarivate profile: https://www.webofscience.com/wos/author/record/85887
PubPeer record (possibly incomplete due to variants of name spelling): https://pubpeer.com/search?q=authors%3A%22mark+d+griffiths%22
– ALOthman, Zeid A..
Clarivate profile: https://www.webofscience.com/wos/author/record/650341
PubPeer record (possibly incomplete due to variants of name spelling): https://pubpeer.com/search?q=authors%3A%22zeid+a+alothman%22
– Bekun, Festus Victor
Clarivate profile: https://www.webofscience.com/wos/author/record/2041322
Typical quote: ” Be that as it may, the evaluations on the primary request distinction information arrangement affirmed the dismissal of the invalid theory at a 1% level of noteworthiness for the entirety of the examples and acknowledged elective speculations.” (From DOI 10.1007/s11356-021-14463-8.)
Since you are already familiar with below names, you can add them to your list due to their high levels of self-citation.
M. Sheikholeslami
M. Hatami, and
O. Mahian
Luckily, these three didn’t make it into the HCR list.
Well, according to the information provided in the two links below and Hatami’s researchgate profile in the awards section, it has been said that all of these three have made it to the HCR list!
https://isc.ac/en/news/1101/researchers-with-the-highest-number-of-citations-in-the-world
http://www.iust.ac.ir/find.php?content_id=52490
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mohammad-Hatami-3
The links refer to the 2017 HCR list. Hatami is not on the 2022 edition of the list advertised here. Either this researcher has slowed down citation gains, or has been caught by Clarivate.
I don’t think they have been caught. No one seems to care about their misconduct, nor can these people be touched.
Several authors from China, Australia, Singapore, etc who have boosted their citations by publishing with international network of coauthors/papermills have made to this list. In addition, many authors in the list have barely published any articles as corresponding authors themselves are also on this list. The authencity of whole list is highly doubtful.
You are right. The famous middleman whose last name is similar to mine is also in this list somehow.
Aha!
– Kumar, P. Senthil.
Clarivate profile: https://www.webofscience.com/wos/author/record/1331959
PubPeer record (possibly incomplete due to variable name spelling): https://pubpeer.com/search?q=authors%3A%22senthil+kumar%22
Still on editorial board of Ecological Processes (Springer) and Environmental Research Communications (IOP). Also, until recently, on the editorial board of some Elsevier journals – but I cannot recall which ones exactly (Chemosphere? Alexandria Engineering Journal?)
Did anyone notice that his primary affiliation in the latest Highly citied list is also Taif University, Saudi Arabia.
Another case of HCR included in the list indicating wrong primary affiliation!
I already indicated that this latest list compiled by Clairvate is total disaster and manipulated by various dubious researchers to indicate their misleading primary affiliations for financial benefits.
There are several such Kumars in this list. One of them publishes between 15 to 25 review articles per year and very few research articles.
Does Clairvate even know difference between research and review articles.
As a result of their ignorance, a scientist who publishes high impact original research articles as corresponding author is not included, but those publishing several review articles even as middle authors have been included.
This discrepancy needs to be fixed.
“For example, outsized output, in which individuals publish two or three papers per week over long periods, by relying on international networks of co-authors, raise the possibility that an individual’s high citation counts may result from co-authors alone when publishing without the individual in question. If more than half of a researcher’s citations derive from co-authors, for example, we consider this narrow rather than community-wide influence, and that is not the type of evidence we look for in naming Highly Cited Researchers. Any author publishing two or three papers per week strains our understanding of the normative standards of authorship and credit.”
And yet Mark Griffiths is on this list.
Another interesting example in the list: Dr. Swati Biswas- Primary affiliation is BITS Pilani, India according to Google.
Interestingly, Primary affiliation in the Highly citied list is Taif University, Saudi Arabia.
We all know for what reason this is done by researchers.
There are several such examples in this highly citied list.
What an interesting list!
Money is real honey and cause of corruption detected in this list.
Science has no meaning or value for such highly citied researchers named in this list and Clairvate has provided them an ideal platform to thrive their business by earning more than 100KUSD per year by just flipping their affiliations in this list as dictated by masters of their secondary institutes.
>>We all know for what reason this is done by researchers.
I don’t. Could you please clarify?
For money.
Science Magazine detailed the scheme in a now decade-old expose: https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.334.6061.1344
“King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, was offering him a contract for an adjunct professorship that would pay $72,000 a year. … a highly cited colleague at another U.S. institution had accepted KAU’s offer, adding KAU as a second affiliation on ISIhighlycited.com.”
ISIhighlycited is the previous name of the ranking discussed here.
There are several errors in this list and it should be withdrawn with apology to whole scientific community.
Hsueh, Po Ren works in Clinical Microbiology and Infectious disease but highly citied in Pharmacology and Toxicology
Jomova Klaudia- Listed as highly citied but never published as coressponding author
There are names of some medical writers also on the list who never do any research.
Really Clairvate is best in messing up things!
A total of 9 highly citied researchers in the current list have wrongly indicated their primary affiliation as Taif University, Saudi Arabia. These include:
Biswas, Swati- India
Galanakis, Charis M- Greece
Kumar, P Senthil-India
Misra, N.N-India
Mohsin, Muhammad- China
Pugazhendhi, Arivalagan-Vietnam
Saravanan,R-Chile
Show, Pau Loke- Malaysia
Thakur, Vijay Kumar-United Kingdom
Clairvate should immediately withdraw this fradulent list and take action against these dubious researchers.
A total of 9 highly citied researchers have wrongly indicated their primary affiliation as Taif University in the latest list.
Clairvate should immediately withdraw such misleading list and take necessary against these dubious researchers.
You all can easily imagine now that how many genuine and deserving candidates have not been included in the current list due to selection of dubious researchers by Clairvate.
This one is definitely emerging as one of the biggest scientific scandal of 2022 in which a number of researchers from different countries could be involved. This requires thorough investigation and withdrawal of the current list.
Hopefully Retraction Watch can help to shed more light on this massive research fraud!
It seems that the inclusion of name in the list this year has promoted high degree of misconduct among many selected researchers.
Clairvate made a big blunder by not checking and verifying the primary affiliations of all the researchers selected for this list.
When it is unable to check only around 7000 primary affiliations properly, how the scientific community can believe that milions of citations of those included in the list would have been scrutinized in a fair manner.
How these people have been made it to the list when their publications and citations do not indicate their primary affiliation like Tauf University as shown in published list. Who is answerable for all these mistakes?
The entire list is thus not credible and appears to perpetuate corruption in Science.
I agree with John.
Publishing such a list creat a great expectation and disappointments and so on… It is just a list of researchers who get many citations. One can easily find from the Scopus, or WOS which paper gets how many citations.
Now, Clarivate start to judge the colleagues and their results. Even, our colleagues did a mistake, this is not their right to judge them. It should be solve in the academic world. To be sincere and honest, the “misconduct” that was “mentioned by the Clarivate manager” was initated by the Clarivate list!
After learning about it, definetely, some people may want to enter the list by cheating…
Clarivate should stop it.
They HAVE NO right to judge the academic research results by using some non-sense statistical formulas.
There is another important implication of wrong primary affiliations indicated by several highly citied reseachers in the current list.
As, the number of Highly Cited Researchers represents 20% of an institution’s score for ranking) the manipulation of the names of primary institutions as detected in the current list will also affect the ranking of various institutions as many HCRs have indicated their secondary institutions as primary ones in the latest list.
Thus rankings of different institutions that will be published in 2023 will also be affected due to major errors found in the current list.
Stanford University (Elsevier) Scopus Top 2% is best. They exclude self-citations and give credit to each author equally.
Every time a New Ranking of Scientists is Coming..AD
Scientific Index 2023. They Should Not be Given any priority…
Yes I agree.
In the current list, many postdoctoral fellows, instructors, other trainees have been included but the corresponding authors of their highly citied papers have been excluded.
How Clairvate can determine that if corresponding author is not included in the list, who specifically among the several other co-authors should be included. How they can quantitate the contribution of several coauthors!
Really strange and full of such discrepancies is this current list!
“Stanford University (Elsevier) Scopus Top 2% is best.”
What does this mean? Stanford University does not publish rankings, and not in collaboration Elsevier or Scopus.
John Ioannidis and his team at Stanford did release a public data set of citations to shed light on the problems of citation based rankings “We hope that the availability of standardized, field-annotated data will help achieve a more nuanced use of metrics, avoiding some of the egregious errors of raw bean-counting that are prevalent in misuse of citation metrics.” See,
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000384
Seems strange anyone would consider this as a ranking of some sort and claim fame from being listed. It’s simply a curated data set for further study.
There are several mistakes that should be taken care of:
Abate, Antonio, King Saud University, Saudi Arabia
Ackermann, Lutz Chemistry King Saud University, Saudi Arabia
Allakhverdiev, Suleyman Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia
Alshareef, Husam N. King Abdullah University of Science & Technology, Saudi Arabia
Andreae, Meinrat O. Geosciences King Saud University, Saudi Arabia
Anthopoulos, Thomas, King Abdullah University of Science & Technology, Saudi Arabia
Many others in China, Malaysia, and other institutes where they hired based on High Impact Factor Papers.
This trend of flipping the names of their primary institutes with secondary ones and vice versa as noted in several cases in the current list is wrong.
The primary institute which provides salary and research infrastructure can lose on world university ranking as a result of such malpractices since the number of Highly Cited Researchers represents 20% of an institution’s score for ranking.
Clairvate should do something to stop such dishonest practices otherwise world university rankings will also be affected in 2023.
In case, Clairvate does not withdraw and republish a revised list after excluding all the corrupt researchers who have flipped their primary affiliations for personal gains, we will start an online petition to exclude this years list for consideration of 20 percent weightage in different World’s University rankings.
Some of us remember when 1 single unscrupulous author single handled altered the University of Alexandria’s ranking via a citation scheme: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/15/education/15iht-educLede15.html
In my opinion, the highly citied list should only consider original research articles of researchers published in last ten years for evaluation.
What I find that around 75 percent of HCRs included have published some relevant/irrelevant review articles along with their collaborators and made it to this list.
Real research impact can only be measured by original research articles published by researchers and not by running factories for churning out reviews like monthly magazines.
Recent Nobel Prize in Physics didn’t have much citations. So they shouldn’t be sole criterion. All rankings are money making system to earn money. Top universities don’t care about rankings.
Also THE and QS rankings don’t consider HCR. Might be some Chinese rankings considering them that’s why they hire so many top scientists around globe especially Europe and USA.
It is very easy to verify the primary affiliation of any researcher by analyzing his/her recent publications.
Why Clairvate failed miserably to catch such dishonest researchers in the final list who have flipped their affiliations is surprising.
Its funny to know that so many of these corrupt researchers were able to dupe Clairvate inspite of so many new measures introduced by them to check the background of selected researchers in this list and made a fortune by flipping their affiliations. The money they earned could be equivalent to 3 to 5 year annual salary for some of these researchers. Really Christmas came early for these dishonest researchers and Clairvate turned out to be their Santa.
The blame entirely lies on Clairvate as it is very easy to check and verify the correct primary affiliation of any researcher by just looking at his/her few recent punlished paper.
I was shocked when I read this post and related comments to find out that how many dishonest researchers have flipped their affiliations in the list and deceived Clairvate.
This is the consequence of not seeking expert opinion while compiling such critical list.
I hope someone in Clairvate will take responsibilty for this ignorance and mess.
Meantime, it will be celebation time for corrupt researchers included in the list as they would receive huge sum of money for this act of dishonesty from people who specifically hired them for this job to increase their university ranking in world.
“I hope someone in Clairvate will take responsibilty for this ignorance and mess.”
You can hope, but don’t hold your breath. It is by constructing these kind of nonsense rankings that such parasitical companies extract money from the work of real scientists. They don’t have much incentives to check things carefully.
Knickers! The people coming and crying here are the ones who did not make it to the list 🙂 C’mon guys/gals – you should either not care about the rankings and focus on your career OR leave academia and perhaps, do something more useful.
The problem is with modern academic setting, not the scientists/researchers. The big bosses get all the money, their favourites are hired to faculty roles, and the deserving struggle to get funding or a job, switching jobs. Have seen these hard realities when I was in academia.
I completely agree with you.
There is no problem with this list and those crying are losers who could not crack it.
I do not see any problem also if researchers switch their affiliations to earn more money.
They must have good credentials and thats why other overseas universities must have hired them for this purpose.
Yes definitely as the salaries paid by most universities remain stagnant over years and researchers need to find innovative ways to increase their incomes to maintain their families especially in times of high inflation after the pandemic. We all are really thankful to Clairvate for giving us this opportunity for obtaining additional income in current hard times.
I and other friends who were highly cited in previous years asked Clarivate about the criteria they are following this year! They answered that it is the same as last year 🙂 They did not mention anything about funding, affiliations, plagiarism, retraction …. HOW was it possible for Clarivate to do all of this analysis for all researchers in such a short time ??? Moreover I can give many contradictive examples for people having more than one affiliation and they have listed as hici! The issue simply is that some jealous researchers listed some hici researchers names to Clarivate to exclude them from the list! Then just clarivate analysed their profiles and tried to find fake reasons to exclude them. The main problem is that Clarivate does not have a clear criteria, like stanford list for example, and then announce the list as they wish! Contuing in this way, they will lose credibility.
Regards
A researchers with about 50 highly cited articles, very few self citations, about 11000 citations , in each of 2021 and 2022 more than 2000 citations, no retraction, no plagrism:)
Let me just leave it here.
https://pubpeer.com/publications/8813237F6A39214950C4C5835D89BC
Raza, R., Sohail, M., Abdeljawad, T., Naz, R., & Thounthong, P. Exploration of temperature-dependent thermal conductivity and diffusion coefficient for thermal and mass transportation in sutterby nanofluid model over a stretching cylinder. Complexity, 2021.
Whats your good name Dear?
Stop blaming Clairvate if you and your colleagues are not included in this years list and try to work harder. Your name cannot be repeated everyyear with only 2000 citations per year.
It appears as a case of “Sour Grapes” for you.
How is it possible that Amit Bhatnagar made it to the list? Most of his paper come from international networks only.
What is your problem if Clairvate includes his name and excludes yours? Try to appreciate those who have been included rather than being a bad loser.
I am included. 🙂 The problem is that Clarivate does not consider the same criteria for all. Amit Bhatnagar’s most papers arise from international networks, which is one of the exclusion criteria by Clarivate.
Then enjoy the success and let Clairvate carry out its work. They are publishing this list from several years and know better than us about inclusion/exclusion criteria.
What is the problem in pointing out obivious error by Clarivate??? There are several other examples above.
I agree that there are several such researchers in the list whose more than 70 percent paper arise from international networks. They may have ticked other criteria for inclusion.
When you publish zero articles you also get zero retraction. The issue is the absence of a clear specific criteria plus….!
There is no actual problem in reality and deserving candidates have been selected.
Some people had high expectations because they had manipulated the system for inclusion. They were however caught and eliminated due to strict measures adapted by Clairvate.
All people above who are making noise belong to that cateogry. I hope you are not among them too.
There are several cases of incorrect inclusion, Amit Bhatnagar just being one of them. I hope you are not among them too. That might explain the reason you are so concerned.
This time there is big mistake in the list.
I did not find any mistakes. It looks that your name is missing from this year’s list.
Other papermill highly cited which was removed from the list after several reports: https://pubpeer.com/search?q=Feckan
Michal Fec̆kan or Michal Fecckan, a mathematician who gained citations after working with papermills.
Nick Wise already exposed the papermill where Michal Fec̆kan or Michal Feckan buys his papers:
https://forbetterscience.com/2023/09/04/ukrainian-papermills-symptom-not-a-cause/
Checking the keywords of the articles shows that Michal is a regular costumer of The European Academy of Sciences Ltd papermill.
It looks that Michal Fec̆kan and Natalia Kryvinska are affected by tutored phrases and papermills:
https://pubpeer.com/search?q=Kryvinska
It is questionable why IEEE wont retract their papers with extensive tortured phrases.
Beside tortured phrases, the duplication is also an issue in mathematics. Revealing the duplication and salami slicing can help in removing the bad mathematics, e.g., see some pubpeer comments for mathematicians and allegations of duplications of Dezső Miklós
https://pubpeer.com/search?q=dezso
After partnering the Clarivate with Retraction Watch mistakes such as making Michal Fec̆kan a highly cited significantly reduced.