A case of forced citations
research data bites 09.
Key takeaways
Forced citations unfairly inflate academic impact and harm research integrity.
Citation-per-publication trends expose rapid, atypical impact growth.
Fong and Wilhite (2017) found that 14.1% of the 110,000 scholars they survey had been coerced into citing non relevant work. They also found that coercion occurred more often for:
lower ranked academic
fewer authors on the manuscript
journals with high impact factor and published by private and profit-oriented companies
Yet, this behaviour is rarely highlighted publicly.. until last week when pubpeer users spotted the following in a peer reviewed publication:
As strongly requested by the reviewers, here we cite some references [[35], [36], [37], [38], [39], [40], [41], [42], [43], [44], [45], [46], [47]] although they are completely irrelevant to the present work.
This post investigates who might have requested these citations and how such cases could be identified in the future. For a complementary discussion, see Leslie McIntosh’s post on Forensic Scientometrics about vanity journals, which explores how the current publishing model facilitates the existence of journals that enable such practices.
A Dimensions’ network to start..
Some researcher sleuth had already suggested that Alex V Trukhanov was the obvious beneficiary of the citation dump by the time I became aware of the scandal. Nevertheless, I put the 12 citations listed in the PubPeer analysis into Dimensions, which revealed the co-authorship network below.
The two largest nodes are from two research who are possible brothers: Sergei Valentnovich Trukhanov (labelled) and Alex Valentinovich Trukhanov (the largest node on the left, partially obscured by Sergei's label). Not only do they share the same family name, but they also have identical middle names; in slavic tradition would be the first name of their father suffixed with -ovich; Trukhanov appears to be relatively uncommon family name either since only about 2,000 people share that name — although that’s the name of a Ukranian politician and a few other researchers. Due to transliteration issues and the fact that both publish at the intersection of Chemistry, Engineering and Physics, Dimensions has attributed at least two profiles to Sergei (Sergei and Sergey) and two to Alex (Alex and Alexey).
Both researchers, based in Belarus and Russia, are listed as co-authors on all 12 references identified, making them the primary beneficiaries of the citation cluster. In the network visualisation, the redder a node appears, the more recent the collaboration.
.. and Gephi to go more in depth
Using data from Dimensions on GBQ and Gephi, I created the co-authorship graph shown below. To build this network, I first identified all the co-authors of Sergei and Alex Trukhanov, then calculated the number of shared publications each co-author had with them. I retained only those co-authors with more than 10 shared publications.
Sergei and Alex Trukhanov occupy central positions in the network. The thickness of the edges represents the number of shared publications between nodes, while the size of each node reflects the total number of shared publications with Alex and Sergei Trukhanov. The colour of the nodes indicates the year of their most recent collaboration — the redder the node, the more recent the collaboration (up to 2024), highlighting that these partnerships are still active.
To maintain readability, I labeled only the top 9 collaborators, each of whom has more than 50 (!!) shared publications. The full list of collaborators, including their publication counts, is available in the table below.
Citations
To assess how well these authors' work has been published compared to some of their peers, I identified the top 23 concepts that characterise their research to date — broadly categorised as condensed matter physics and materials science. I then selected researchers with exceptionally high publication and citation rates. To evaluate their impact, I calculated the citation-per-publication rate by dividing the number of citations received in a given year by the total number of publications up to that point.
This analysis includes six researchers alongside Alex and Sergei Turkhanov. Two of these researchers exhibited a similar trajectory, although their citation-per-publication rate peaked over a three-year period, increasing from 3 to 8 citations per publication, compared to the Turkhanovs' steeper rise from 2 to 9 over just two years.
Conclusion
This investigation reveals how forced citation practices can artificially boost academic metrics, benefiting specific researchers at the expense of integrity. Citation-per-publication trends highlighted here these irregularities, emphasising the need for transparency and ethical practices in scholarly publishing.
References
Fong EA, Wilhite AW. Authorship and citation manipulation in academic research. PLoS One. 2017;12(12) doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0187394