Abstract
In this letter, we focus on a very curious and bibliometrically important case of a 2017 moth pheromone paper published in Cell Press’ Current Biology that has already accumulated over 1600 Google Scholar-based citations within the past 4 years (i.e., since 2020) to appreciate whether all those citations are valid, i.e., within thematic scope, or whether a portion of those citations might be invalid, and which we colloquially refer to herein as “unwanted citations”. Our investigation assessed Scopus-based data (1088 citations on 10 August 2023). In addition to creating a SciVal thematic profile, which indicated a wide diversity of topics of papers citing the 2017 paper, a manual screen revealed only one paper that was directly thematically relevant to the topic of insect reproductive biology. The remaining > 99% of citations, or “unwanted citations”, are invalid. To reflect a valid state of scientific truthfulness, those papers should be corrected to reflect that citation abuse has taken place.
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Data availability
The raw data of the analyses in Scopus are available in Suppl. file 1.
Notes
We note that Vickers’ GS profile also includes several published abstracts submitted in connection with meetings. None of these have any citations and make no contribution to the total citation count. The quoted numbers indicate peer-reviewed publications as well as other publications that have had some editorial oversight and review as well as 4 citations of Vickers’ Ph.D. thesis.
We cite two examples in a Wiley and Elsevier title: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aoc.7194; https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1018364723002859
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Disclaimer
A prior submission (30 June 2023) to Current Biology was met with a swift desk rejection within 24 hours, with the claim by the Editorial office that the issue with excessive citations “appears to be generated by a faulty URL completion at Google Scholar”, which may explain only a small percentage of the total number of mis-citations, and fails to acknowledge the need for a more in-depth investigation.
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Except for the database searches in Scopus, which were conducted by the third author, all three authors contributed equally to all other aspects of the paper, including, but not exclusively limited to, conceptual design, discussion and debate, methodology, analysis and validation, writing and editing all versions of the manuscript.
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da Silva, J.A.T., Vickers, N.J. & Nazarovets, S. From citation metrics to citation ethics: Critical examination of a highly-cited 2017 moth pheromone paper. Scientometrics 129, 693–703 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04855-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04855-7