Why was a examine about autism cited by a paper on plant magnificence? | Spectrum
Citation inflation: Autism studies, among others, appear in the reference lists of unrelated articles, possibly in an attempt to artificially improve authors’ metrics.
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One contribution deals with the aesthetic beauty of plant landscapes. Another reviews the use of anesthetics in cancer patients. A third aims to optimize the efficient operation of buses using deep learning.
Still, they each cite studies on autism—including one in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health and one in Neural Computing and Applications. And no one is quite sure why.
Autism studies, among others, appear in the reference lists of entirely unrelated articles, suggesting what some scientists fear is a larger conspiracy to manipulate citations and artificially inflate the impact of research papers.
Both Autism Papers were co-authored by N. Arunkumar, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Rathinam Technical Campus in Tamil Nadu, India. Arunkumar also co-authored the study on anesthetics that cites one of his autism publications.
Several posts on PubPeer — an online platform researchers use to discuss journal publications — indicate that Arunkumar’s studies, including those on autism, are often cited out of context.
Guillaume Cabanac, associate professor of computer science at the University of Toulouse in France, told Spectrum that PubPeer listings of articles with nonsensical references are a growing trend.
“These papers cite a paper on autism, but there is no relationship between the paper cited and the reference cited,” says Cabanac. From these citation patterns, one can conclude that autism is a hot research topic because studies in this area are cited from several other disciplines, he says. “But that’s not really the case,” adds Cabanac. “It’s more of a scam.”
mSeveral studies citing Arunkumar’s papers have been retracted, retracted, or deserve concern, although none of his own papers have been retracted, according to the Retraction Watch Database. (A co-founder of Retraction Watch, Ivan Oransky, is also Editor-in-Chief of Spectrum.)
Of the 91 studies listed on Arunkumar’s Google Scholar page, only 4 have “autism” in their titles. His publication list indicates that he has authored studies on a variety of topics, including lung cancer, Parkinson’s disease, and artificial intelligence.
Nonetheless, Clarivate Analytics included Arunkumar in its list of the world’s top 1 percent of cited scientists in his field after 2018 saw a surge in citations of his work. This year, Arunkumar amassed nearly 800 citations – significantly more than the previous seven years of his career combined.
ONErunkumar is not the only researcher with a strange citation list. His frequent co-author Mohamed Elhoseny, Associate Professor of Information Systems at the University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, is also listed by Clarivate as a frequently cited researcher. Between 2018 and 2021, Elhoseny authored between 40 and 60 articles per year and reviewed hundreds of others: he reviewed more than 300 manuscripts in 2018 alone.
However, commentators on PubPeer noted that Elhoseny’s studies – none of which appear to address autism – were cited in 144 articles published by the Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems (JIFS). Almost all of these articles were part of special editions, often guest-edited, and at least two were co-edited by Elhoseny himself.
Spectrum has emailed Arunkumar and Elhoseny twice for comments but has not yet received a response.
IIn November 2021, IOS Press, which publishes JIFS, withdrew 49 articles after determining that “these articles cite literature sources unrelated to the topic of the citing article”. The retraction notice concluded, “This may be the result of a deliberate attempt to manipulate the citation performance of the scholarly literature.” Last year, Clarivate removed JIFS from its citation reports for journals for allegedly stacking citations.
In September 2021, publishing giant Springer Nature flagged 436 studies — including the study on plant aesthetics — published as part of special collections in its journals with “raises of concern,” amid fears that rogue editors or impersonators may have intentionally tampered with the process.
“Sometimes there are situations where the guest editors of special issues use that special issue as a vehicle to promote themselves, journals with which they are affiliated, and their own peers,” says Matt Hodgkinson, director of research integrity at Open Access Publishing Hindawi in London, England.
A Clarivate spokesperson declined to comment on individual researchers, but did point out to Spectrum the methodology the company uses to determine frequently cited researchers, noting that in 2019 the company began excluding authors who use their own over-citing work. The methodology reads: “Scientists who have committed scientific misconduct in formal proceedings conducted by a research institution, government agency, funder or publisher will be excluded from our list.”
Cyril Labbé, a computer scientist at the Université Grenoble Alpes in France, disagrees with the assessment made by researchers based on their citations. “For me this one [kinds] from ‘mechanic’ and ‘blind’ [rankings] are completely detached from what matters in science,” he says. It “does not reflect the why of the citations and thus should not be used as a proxy for identifying individuals of value to science.”
Hodgkinson says this could be a case of forced citation, a practice in which journal editors or peer reviewers require study authors to add specific citations as a condition for their articles to be accepted and published.
Cabanac says it’s important for publishers to do their research to keep their journal articles free of unnecessary citation and to find out if authors are complicit in the practice. “I can think of two explanations [for] those weird quotes,” adds Labbé. “One of them is inserting random out-of-context quotes into random text. The other is intentional manipulation of quotes. The latter seems more likely.”
Cite this article: https://doi.org/10.53053/MGSA7457
