Citation cartels and the sham of academic publishing, By Usman Isyaku

Add us on Google

Academic integrity is not optional. You can choose the hard path of genuine research, where your work stands the test of peer review, contributes meaningfully to knowledge, and earns you respect in the long term. Or you can choose the sham path of citation cartels, where you build castles on sand. The latter may give you numbers, such as appearing on global most cited lists, but it will not give you respect or impact, such as being able to collaborate with the top players in the field globally or securing globally respected research positions.

In the past few days, I have been drawn into several discussions and debates about a troubling malpractice that is quietly gaining momentum in certain countries and beginning to seep into Nigeria. It is the sham of citation cartels and the artificial inflation of publication numbers. What makes it alarming is the brazenness with which some academics are presenting these ridiculous records of achievement. You hear of a PhD student emerging after three years with sixty or more publications. You see early career academics parading hundreds of citations gathered in the space of months. Anyone familiar with how real research works knows this is impossible under genuine academic conditions. What is happening is not scholarship but the spread of a black market for publications and citations that deceives only the uncritical eye and cheapens the idea of academic prestige.

Join the Premium Times WhatsApp Community For Quick Access To News and Happenings Around You.

Open in WhatsApp

At this point, it has become imperative to explain how citation cartels operate in the most basic way possible. Anyone who truly wants to understand and avoid deception must grasp this problem. Citation cartels are no longer hidden. They are increasingly being exposed in academic literature, including in reputable journals. It is a recognised ethical problem. Yet, their spread continues because many scholars, particularly from countries with weak academic integrity, indulge in this fraud. It is nothing more than a black market for citations and publications that creates false prestige without genuine impact.

Here is how it works.

A typical PhD programme in developed countries lasts three to four years. It is unheard of for someone to emerge from that with sixty or more publications. If it were genuinely possible, we would see it in universities across the developed world. And if someone was so exceptional that they managed it, they would be working side by side with top players in their field and their contributions would be acknowledged worldwide. What we see instead is a flood of PhD graduates from certain countries who claim large numbers of publications in record time, yet their names never appear in leading universities or serious global research circles.

The black-market method is simple. Imagine a PhD student joins a research group that thrives on this game. At their first meeting, the group decides to produce fifty papers in six months. He is asked to draft ten manuscripts. Four others in the group take the same task, producing forty more. In the end, there are fifty manuscripts. Each person is first author on their own ten. The trick lies in authorship distribution. Every member’s name is added to every manuscript. This means each person now has fifty papers to their name, even though they only wrote ten.

The speed of publication raises another question. Where is the peer review? The answer is that there is none. The journals in question are usually “indexed” but sit in the bottom tier of their fields. They are journals where no serious researcher from a leading university would waste time publishing or citing from. More importantly, these journals are often controlled by the same cartel members. One of them might be the assistant editor, another the editor-in-chief.

The next step is citation. Each paper must cite the other forty-nine. The arithmetic is simple. Fifty papers citing forty-nine others each equal 2,450 citations. Within a few months, the new PhD has fifty publications and 2,450 citations. If an older academic who had already published fifty papers the previous year using the same method joins, he instructs the group to cite his old fifty papers. That instantly doubles his numbers, taking him to nearly 5,000 citations.

The speed of publication raises another question. Where is the peer review? The answer is that there is none. The journals in question are usually “indexed” but sit in the bottom tier of their fields. They are journals where no serious researcher from a leading university would waste time publishing or citing from. More importantly, these journals are often controlled by the same cartel members. One of them might be the assistant editor, another the editor-in-chief. They act as authors at the front end and as editors at the back end, approving their own manuscripts without scrutiny. They might send the manuscripts to familiar people to ratify them as “reviewed.”

Stay Ahead with Premium Times

Follow us on Google News and never miss breaking stories, investigations, and in-depth reporting.

Add as a preferred source on Google

This is not research. It is organised fraud. It is system gaming of the crudest kind. But because databases like Scopus and Web of Science rank scholars by citation numbers alone, these cartel members can appear on the lists of “most cited” scholars globally. A casual observer may see them on these lists and assume brilliance, when in truth their work carries no real academic weight.

The flaws are obvious once you dig deeper. As mentioned, their journals are indexed but rank in the bottom twenty or thirty per cent. Their rising impact factors are built on self-citation and cartel citation, rather than genuine readership. Their papers are never cited by top universities. Their work never shifts the direction of knowledge or technology. It is never groundbreaking. It is just noise multiplied and packaged.

If someone truly published these high numbers of papers in a PhD programme, each of groundbreaking quality, the world would know it. Leading universities and industries would compete to recruit them. Their discoveries would change the field. They would be celebrated as geniuses. They would attract large research grants. That is what happens when work is published in the top five or ten per cent of journals, subjected to rigorous independent peer review…

And let us be clear. If someone truly published these high numbers of papers in a PhD programme, each of groundbreaking quality, the world would know it. Leading universities and industries would compete to recruit them. Their discoveries would change the field. They would be celebrated as geniuses. They would attract large research grants. That is what happens when work is published in the top five or ten per cent of journals, subjected to rigorous independent peer review, and tested for novelty and true contribution. But these cartel scholars remain under-employed and poorly remunerated, relative to their exceptional résumés.

This is because they choose the sham route. They inflate their résumés with publications and citations that deceive only the uncritical eye. They may succeed temporarily in appearing on global lists, but as algorithms become smarter and as scrutiny deepens, these frauds will be exposed, just as many research papers have already exposed them. When they step out into the real world of serious scholarship, they are quickly unmasked.

Academic integrity is not optional. You can choose the hard path of genuine research, where your work stands the test of peer review, contributes meaningfully to knowledge, and earns you respect in the long term. Or you can choose the sham path of citation cartels, where you build castles on sand. The latter may give you numbers, such as appearing on global most cited lists, but it will not give you respect or impact, such as being able to collaborate with the top players in the field globally or securing globally respected research positions. The world has moved on. Those who try to buy their way into significance through black-market tactics will eventually be called out for what they are: frauds masquerading as scholars. Not everything that glitters is gold.

Usman Isyaku earned his PhD in Human Geography (Environment and Development) at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom. He is based in Oslo, Norway, and can be contacted at [email protected].