One "Top 2% Scientist" Earned Abnormal Citations via "Citation-from-Pal" and "Citation-from-Themself"
ZHU Bin (朱斌), who earned the title of "Top 2% Scientist" in 2022, and is working for Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, and Southeast University, China, is found to receive abnormal citations via "Citation-from-Pal" and "Citation-from-Themself".
An investigation by the 5GH Team [1] finds an article coauthored by Rizwan Raza, a frequent coauthor with ZHU, cites 14 of ZHU’s publications in its opening sentence: "The fuel cell research community has recently paid close attention to nanocomposite ceramic fuel cells [1-15]". Although 9 of these 14 citations were also coauthored by Raza, this unusually high concentration of citations to a specific author raises concerns about potential citation manipulation to inflate ZHU’s metrics.
A separate investigation from the team [2] finds another Raza-coauthored article that cites 15 papers by ZHU, accounting for 52% of its total references. Similarly, a third article [3] authored by Raza includes 11 citations to ZHU’s work out of the 60 total references.
Multiple articles coauthored by ZHU exhibit elevated rates of self-citation (a.k.a. Citation-from-Themself). The 5GH Team has found 6 articles where self-citations to ZHU’s own articles exceed 25% of the total references: B Zhu (2011) [4] with 35% self-citation, LD Fan (2011) [5] with 33% self-citation, M Afzal (2017) [6] with 30% self-citation, MS Sharif (2024) [7] with 28% self-citation, R Raza (2012) [8] with 28% self-citation, and B Zhu (2013) [9] with 26% self-citation.
More articles are under investigation.
Reference
[3] 10.1016/j.jallcom.2024.175408
[4] 10.1016/j.ijhydene.2011.04.082
[5] 10.1016/j.jpowsour.2011.12.017
[6] 10.1016/j.ijhydene.2017.05.024
[7] 10.1016/j.ceramint.2024.04.330
