Uncovering a “citation ring”
The science blog Retraction Watch claims to have uncovered a “citation ring”. We take a look at how researchers can collaborate to generate citations and thereby artificially inflate the impact of their work.
A large number of publications and citations doesn’t mean research is built on solid foundations. | Photo: iStock
Publishing as much as possible as quickly as possible is only one aspect of achieving success as a science researcher. In order to prove that the content of your latest article is significant, it also has to be cited as often as possible by other researchers. But as the science blog Retraction Watch has shown in the case of the Indian computer scientist Thippa Reddy Gadekallu, this process can culminate in sheer absurdity.
Gadekallu is attached to Zhejiang A&F University in China and has been immensely productive, publishing more than 440 research articles over the last ten years. In 2023, he was actually producing one article every four days. By 2025, these articles had themselves been cited more than 23,000 times. “Gadekallu supercharged his impact by establishing a network of more than 1,000 coauthors”, says Retraction Watch. In short, what they claim to have revealed is nothing less than a “citation ring”.
María de los Ángeles Oviedo García, an economist at the University of Seville, has shown how this works on the web platform ‘For Better Science’. She examined the information on the editors of Gadekallu’s articles that is made publicly available by scientific publishers such as PLOS and MPDI. There she found that Gadekallu and his co-authors were working as reviewers and editors for journals and were passing around peer-review assignments for newly submitted articles amongst themselves. In their subsequent peer reviews, they then insisted that article authors should cite the work of Gadekallu and his colleagues. Oviedo García calls this “coercive citation”. She adds: “All the journals and publishers where the co-authors served as editors should investigate whether their pattern of misbehaviour has been repeated in other cases”.
But an anonymous comment on Retraction Watch prefers to place the responsibility clearly on the publishers themselves, asking: “Why single out one researcher when the failure is clearly systemic?”. As for Gadekallu himself, he has assured Retraction Watch that everything he’s done is in fact above board: “I completely understand why it might look concerning from the outside, but I categorically deny any behind the scenes coordination, pressure, or exchange regarding citations”.
