"For authors, the payoff is clear: The more citations your articles generate, the more influential they appear. And journals have similar incentives: Encourage authors to cite papers that appear in your pages and you’ve created the illusion that your journal is highly influential. Indeed, the controversial Impact Factor ranks scientific periodicals on how frequently their articles earn citations. The lure is so strong that editing services have been found to produce papers — citations included — for a charge...
A new paper joins a small band of researchers trying to identify these cartels — before they do too much damage.
The paper, in Frontiers in Physics, is by a group at the University of Maribor in Slovenia. They use existing tools for analyzing data online and demonstrate that they can pick out cartel behavior in an artificial list of publications. The work is preliminary, and with good reason. “Trying to conclude whether articles have been published with the specific intent to increase the citation statistics of a cited journal, and in particular the journal’s impact factor, is perhaps a slippery slope,” wrote a different group of bibliometricians"
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