The 'top experts' in your field might just be part of a digital cartel that manufactures prestige through automated citation loops.
April 16, 2026
Original Paper
Citation Farming on ResearchGate: Blatant and Effective
arXiv · 2604.13784
The Takeaway
We assume the scientific record is a meritocracy where the most important papers get the most citations. This study exposes a massive 'citation farming' operation on ResearchGate where groups of authors use identical, automated reference lists to boost each other's metrics. It’s not just a few people cheating; it’s a systemic gaming of the indicators we use to hire professors and award grants. This means the 'impact' scores we trust to distinguish between breakthrough science and noise are increasingly being bought or manufactured. For regular people, this is a warning that 'expert' consensus can be an illusion created by a group of bots and coordinated accounts rather than actual discovery.
From the abstract
We investigate platform-native citation farming on ResearchGate by analyzing almost 3000 papers uploaded by five suspected boosting-service provider accounts. From the uploaded papers and associated metadata, we construct both paper-level and author-level citation networks. We introduce an interpretable structural signal for coordinated boosting, \emph{equal references groups}: clusters of papers with equal reference lists. We find that many papers from our collection exhibit this motif, that is