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?
Ok. Big deal?
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.