Muhammad Zain Yousaf, a postdoc at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, became a scholar of note overnight. Or so it would seem, based on his now-defunct Google Scholar profile: From a modest 47 in 2022 and around 100 in 2023, Yousaf’s citations jumped to 629 in 2024. His h-index, a measure combining publication and citation numbers, took off accordingly, reaching levels typical of a senior academic.
But another researcher smelled a rat and took a closer look at Yousaf’s publications. In just two days, Yousaf had uploaded 10 short documents to TechRxiv, a preprint server hosted by the U.S.-based Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, or IEEE. Each of the documents was chock-full of self-citations. In five cases, Yousaf was an author on all 37 papers in the reference list; the rest of the time, his publications made up nearly two-thirds of the reference list.
”Many of these documents appear to be low quality, as evidenced by their lack of coherence and technical quality,” the concerned researcher, who asked to remain anonymous, said of the preprints in an email to TechRxiv last December.
The researcher added that Yousaf’s actions were ”a clear attempt to manipulate citation metrics on external platforms such as Google Scholar” and ”undermine the credibility of TechRxiv as a platform for genuine academic contributions.”
One year later all of the documents remain on IEEE’s server. “IEEE is aware of the concerns regarding these papers and is investigating,” Francine Tardo, corporate spokesperson for the organization, told us.
Yousaf, an electrical engineer, did not acknowledge our emails laying out the allegations against him and asking for an interview. But on the day we first contacted him, the researcher’s Google Scholar page, which listed his h-index as 21, was taken down; his name on TechRxiv was shortened to “Yousaf” and delinked from his ORCID profile; and the ORCID entry describing his current position at Zhejiang University – “Posdoctrate (Space)” (sic) – disappeared. Several more entries were removed later. A recent paper lists Yousaf’s affiliations as the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Zhejiang University and the Center for Research on Microgrids (CROM) at Huanjiang Laboratory in Zhuji.
Google Scholar has become the go-to source of publication metrics for academics evaluating new job applicants, even at renowned universities in the United States and England. But the tool is exceedingly easy to game for those looking for a shortcut to impressive numbers – the service will index even non-existent papers cited in preprints – as researchers have shown again and again (and again and again and again). We wrote about a high-profile computer scientist in Spain, Juan Manuel Corchado, who had done just that in 2022.
To get a better sense of how this tactic inflated the researcher’s h-index, David Robert Grimes, one of Retraction Watch’s Sleuths in Residence, scraped data from Google Scholar on September 10, when Yousaf’s h-index was 19. Excluding self-citations slashed the index to 13, and removing sources with no or minimal peer review, such as preprints and conference proceedings, brought it down to 12. When Grimes excluded both self-citation and sources without peer review, Yousaf’s h-index dropped to 9, a reduction of more than 50 percent. (Yousaf’s h-index according to Scopus, the Elsevier citation database, is 14, up from 13 in November.)
“This is far from the first time somebody has used non-peer-reviewed archives to manipulate Google Scholar,” said Reese Richardson of Northwestern University, who studies scientific fraud. “Google Scholar has made it very clear they don’t intend to fix this. They have known about this for 10 years.”
Google did not respond to requests for comment.
Yasir Zaki, a computer scientist at New York University Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, recently published a study describing different ways Google Scholar metrics can be manipulated. Yousaf’s case, Zaki said, is “in line with what we have seen in the past.”
”Many of our suspicious authors were uploading documents to either ResearchGate or Authorea,” Zaki told us. “On a related note, arXiv has banned computer-science review papers that have not been published for the exact same reason, because some authors are using this as a way to inflate their citations.”
Zaki said he and his colleagues built a tool using data from OpenAlex to visualize collaboration patterns for specific researchers. The tool shows Yousaf had nearly 130 unique coauthors with whom he collaborated only once, and that in 2025, Yousaf had as many as 120 new unique coauthors – both abnormally high numbers, according to Zaki.
Graham Kendall, a computer scientist and deputy vice chancellor at Mila University in Malaysia who writes frequently about publications ethics, also noted a steep rise in citations in 2025 on Yousaf’s Scopus profile. Such an increase raises “a red flag,” Kendall told us.
In Richardson’s view, metrics gaming “is going to happen so long as there’s a pressure for citations. The question is, who is going to willingly participate in it? So TechRxiv has decided that they’re going to, Google Scholar has decided that they’re going to.”
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