Abnormal Reference Patterns on Special Issue "Geomicrobiology: Latest Advances and Prospects"

An Investigation by the 5GH Team reveals that the articles published on the Special Issue "Geomicrobiology: Latest Advances and Prospects" have high proportions of references to Cesareo Saiz-Jimenez, one of the special issue's guest editors, suggesting potential misconduct by Saiz-Jimenez to promote his citations with his editorial role on the special issue.

Up to recently, the Special Issue "Geomicrobiology: Latest Advances and Prospects" of the journal "Applied Science", one of the MDPI titles, has published 5 articles (3 research articles, and 2 review articles), on 3 of which (2 research articles and 1 review article), high proportions (8% - 10%) of references were authored by Cesareo Saiz-Jimenez. Another review article, co-authored by Saiz-Jimenez, has 9 references (6% of the total references) to himself. These references patterns seem unusual, and may be resulted of misconduct by Saiz-Jimenez to promote his citations, which needs further investigation by the publishers.

Previous investigations by the 5GH Team [1-4] and others suggest that some researchers took their roles as guest editors of the special issues to promote their publications. It seems that others took their roles to promote their citations, another kind of misconducts the scientific community should play more attentions to.



Reference

[1] 5GH-WuGH-20240816.001

[2] 5GH-WuGH-20240719.001

[3] 5GH-WuGH-20240717.002

[4] 5GH-WuGH-20240717.001






Author: WU Guangheng

Founder and Chair of the 5GH Foundation

E-Mail: wu@5gh.org.cn

Document ID: 5GH-WuGH-2025.000007

Publication Date: 2025.01.07

This article is licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License

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