This article is compiled from a press report published by Science on February 12, 2024, titled "Vendor Offering Citation for Purchase is the Latest Bad Actor Inscholarly Publishing".
In 2023, the academic profile of a new scientist appeared in Google Scholar, whose name had never been heard before, but whose area of expertise was listed by the database36th placeThe most cited scholar. Hish-index is 19, which means that he has been cited at least 19 times in 19 articles. According to a preprint study (below) published in ARXIV by New York University researcher Yasir Zaki et alThe scientist and his affiliation are fictitious, and the ** he published ** was written by chatgpt, ** and the citation was also fake:Some are from excessive self-citation, and there are 50 citationsIt was purchased for $300 from a ** merchant that provided a "citation service".(The researchers did not disclose the name of the ** business, in order to avoid bringing more business to them). 
arxiv.org/abs/2402.04607 The study falsified the researcher, suggesting that Google Scholar's data could also be manipulated. Jennifer Byrne, a cancer researcher at the University of Sydney, worries: ".Bulk purchase references may beA new development trend. Zaki's team initially noticed anomalous citations among real researchers, combing through the Google Scholar profiles of more than 1.6 million researchers, focusing on authors who had published at least 10** and had 200 citationsThe number of citations by 1016 researchers increased tenfold in one year。The team marked114 investigators, they got more than 18 citations from a single article**, which is a suspicious sign. "No matter how good a scientist is, there are few multiple citations of the same **," Zaki said. In an amazing case,Ninety percent of the references in one article are from the same researcher。Many of the citations from the 114 researchers** were published in low-quality journals, including non-peer-reviewed preprints. Some documents are not even cited in the text at all, but are only added to the final reference list。One of the researchers had received multiple citations from a ResearchGate account, and they investigated further and found that the account turned out to bePublicly advertise purchase citationsservices. Based on this, the research team decided to fake a Google Scholar account to confirm whether citations could be purchased. They come firstLet chatgpt write 20 ** articles about fake news, and do a lot of self-citationThis is a common practice used by some researchers to increase the number of citations. They then publish the article on various preprint servers. Google Scholar detected the articles, generated a profile of the fictitious researcher, listed the preprints as publications, and made them available380 articlesCite information. In the name of the fictitious researcher, the research team contacted the ** merchant through WhatsApp and purchased it".50 citations**”。Within the next 40 days,Five of the first papers were published, each citing 10 articles by the fictional researcher。4 out of 5 were published in the same chemistry journal, however, these fictional ** have nothing to do with chemistry at all. The above behavior suggests that some researchers are using this strategy to increase the number of citations. Other ** published in this journal may also take on this function. The team also found thatEven if the article is deleted from the preprint server, the number of citations contributed remains the same。This is clearly a loophole. To identify potentially problematic citations, the researchers propose a new metric called:Citing the concentration index (C2-index, reflecting the number of multiple citations to the same investigator. A higher h-index indicates that a researcher has high academic attainments and good reputation, while a higher c2-index indicates that the researcher should be reserved. For example, a researcher's C2-index of 45 indicates that there are 45 articles that have been cited at least 45 times. **The article of the Medical Coffee Club is compiled from: scienceorg/content/article/vendor-offering-citations-purchase-latest-bad-actor-scholarly-publishing