A paper that cited a single researcher’s work in 53 of 64 references will be retracted following our inquiries, the publisher of the journal has told Retraction Watch.
The article, ‘Culturally-informed for designing motorcycle fire rescue: Empirical study in developing country’, published in June in AIP Advances, overwhelmingly cites the work of Muhammed Imam Ammarullah, a lecturer at Universitas Pasundan in West Java, Indonesia, sometimes without obvious relevance to the text.
An anonymous tipster came across the soon-to-be retracted paper on Google Scholar, then alerted the editors at AIP Advances in June to the strange citation pattern. The journal investigated, but didn’t acknowledge a problem with the excessive citations to Ammarullah’s work in their initial response to the complaint. Instead, they identified issues with six other, unrelated citations, according to emails seen by Retraction Watch.
During the initial investigation, the publisher found the authors added those six references at the request of a reviewer. The references “do not appear to enrich the discussion of the results presented,” a representative from the journal wrote in an email to the tipster. But the journal found “no clear evidence of coercion to include those references by the part of the reviewer or handling editors,” although the investigation “did reveal gaps” in the journal’s guidelines for including citations.
After we asked about the 53 citations, the publisher said they had decided to pull the paper because they found those citations were also “unrelated to the subject discussed in the text.” The authors have not responded to requests for comment.
Other papers follow the same pattern. Scientific sleuth Nick Wise has flagged 13 articles on PubPeer with an unusually high number of citations to Ammarullah’s work “shoehorned” into the text, he said. Of the 13 flagged papers, two authors of two separate papers responded to our questions. Both said an anonymous reviewer added the citations during the review process.
Hamed Nosrati, co-author of “Artificial Intelligence in Regenerative Medicine: Applications and Implications,” a paper in Biomimetics which Wise flagged, said an ethical specialist at the journal contacted him after Wise’s comment appeared on Pubpeer. According to Nosrati, after a review, an academic editor concluded that the references included didn’t affect the article’s overall readability or main conclusions.
Kuppalapalle Vajravelu, corresponding author of “Effects of Stefan blowing on mixed convection heat transfer in a nanofluid flow with Thompson and Troian slip,” another paper citing Ammarullah, also flagged on PubPeer, said an anonymous reviewer suggested the citations to “improve the quality of the paper.”
References can be a “grey area,” the journal’s editor, John Abraham of the University of St. Thomas, said in response to our questions, “because while topic areas may seem different, there are often subtle overlaps that justify inclusion.” Taylor and Francis, the paper’s publisher, said they were looking into the concerns.
Wise doesn’t see a common denominator among the papers that cite Ammarullah’s work without clear relevance. “They’re all different authors, different countries, different institutions,” he said, which could be evidence the common thread is “much deeper and worse.”
Citation manipulation, whether coerced citations, buying citations, or citation rings – groups of researchers who agree to cite each other’s work – isn’t new, but has become easier to detect and attracted more attention recently. Extreme cases demonstrate how far the practice can go. Wise was involved in a recent experiment that garnered Larry, a feline, more than 100 citations.
Ammarullah, who has not responded to our request for comment, has tallied more than 1,200 citations since the start of 2023 and is listed as an author on 53 publications in that timeframe. Clarivate’s Web of Science recently named one of his articles published in an MDPI journal a “hot paper” – a title given to publications that rack up enough citations to place them in the top 0.1% of papers in a particular field.
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What does “said an anonymous reviewer added the citations during the review process” mean? How does a reviewer have access to the manuscript to add citations? Is this an instance of compromised peer review, namely that the author(s) and reviewer(s) are one and the same? Could it be that the authors let this information — that they reviewed and editor their own paper — slip via their reply?
“Added the citations” probably means “insisted that the citations be added.” This can happen legitimately, but is also the standard way that citation coercion happens: many, many cases are known.
Without more evidence to support the idea that the authors did this willingly, I think it’s much more likely that the reviewer asked for citations, and the authors caved because they wanted the paper published. The person in the best position to stop this was the editor, who knew who the reviewer was: this is at best a failure of editorial oversight, and at worst the editor is on-board with the citation coercion.
Ok. Big deal?
Garbage citations are harmful in several ways:
(1) They get in the way of scholars actually making use of the citations. Not much fun trying to look at citations when half of them are bogus.
(2) They gain citations for people who do not deserve them, which as long as citations are a measure of scientific success, means that they harm honest researchers who don’t pad their citations.
(3) They gain citations for journals who do not deserve them, with the same bad results.
(4) They erode the moral contract of scientific publishing, contribute to cynicism, and damage the reputation of science.
AIP Advances and in general AIP Publishing are very reluctant to correct their mistakes even when pointed out. In another case involving studies of Dr Sanal Kumar and his research team, which was also featured here in RW, the journals and AIP Advances in particular took no real action to retract despite a formal submitted Comment being reviewed and one of the reviewers recommending that the original work was entirely wrong. It took them about five months to arrive at this decision – and Kumar’s papers also in Physics of Fluids, another AIP journal, are also along similar lines as discussed here – a lot of self citations and then several other citations that are of no real consequence to the work – he creates a mix to hide the self citations, but it obvious that except for a couple of standard texts there are no other real references except his own bogus studies that are being referred to.
RW should not get involved in initiating retraction, it must only watch. Thats a conflict of interests.
RetractionVoyeur.com domain was already taken.
Some reviewers “strongly suggest” authors to cite certain works to “elevate the manuscript quality” and most of the time, the anonymous reviewer refers to papers by the same author. It doesn’t take a genius to know who the reviewer was after 3-4 suggestions.
Most of the time, their reviews were also superficial , such as English editing suggestions, or citation style consistency.
This is RW’s business.
Seems that the problem could have been stopped from happening if only: “all the suggested citations should be monitored by the journals and publishers with scrutiny for ensuring the research integrity, and they need to take some serious measures in this regard. Any reviewers involved in this typical behavior should be banned from reviewing process for at least a certain amount of time. [https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-024-09994-0]”
Further problems with the work by Vajravelu mentioned above have been uncovered:
https://pubpeer.com/publications/06635A5E67B4BA34F7AC9E38693078#2
The citations absolutely do not “improve the quality of the paper.” This is a flawed work.
What about RetractionInstigators.com? The watchers from RW can then go on RI to begin the process of cleaning up the literature by instigating the retractions.
Really, the only thing you found wrong were the citations?
I looked at the title and thought: “This is utter *gibberish*, possibly along the lines of the Sokal hoax!”
Papers citing mmarullah and the respective citing times within a paper.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vTw-uNmyZT9JpXev3KUbENwMszxq5m4XrbgpT-v–o8/edit?usp=sharing
Somehow, we have arrived at the believe that honesty is better than cheating. There is no such thing as honesty in the sense that it is here portrayed. We are all dependent on the ideas of others and just because one writer is more clever at covering his traces in “borrowing” doesn’t make him any “gooder.”
WOW
My manuscript was rejected by a reviewer for reasons that I failed to cite two of his publications.
The real impact of scientific research should be what we should concern ourselves with not the number of citations.