Anna Abalkina, a social scientist at the Free University of Berlin and a well-known research integrity sleuth, shared a spreadsheet of the 20 papers she thinks were published for the sole purpose of boosting certain researchers’ citation counts. The affected papers were published by the scientific publishing giants Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, and Elsevier, whose representatives all say they are investigating the matter. When Abalkina did some more digging, she found papers with authors listed as being based in several other countries, including Senegal, Kenya, Somalia, Namibia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt. One thing most of these countries have in common is that researchers based there are typically eligible for waivers of APC fees.

But the problem with the business model these bad actors have been using is that it requires adding real author names to papers and paying APCs to publish in open-access journals, Abalkina says. If these papers are retracted, the listed authors can face consequences, she notes. Listing fake authors and misusing waivers solves those problems, Abalkina explains. And if papers are retracted, that doesn’t affect the clients of the cartels since citations from retracted papers still count toward metrics like the h-index.

Source https://cen.acs.org/research-integrity/Citation-cartels-use-fake-author/104/web/2026/02

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