In our November “how can we help you?” thread, a reader writes:
One of my papers has recently gotten a bunch of citations from non-philosophical articles in dubious journals that don’t have anything to do with (and don’t engage with) the paper. These fake citations now make up about a third of my citations on Google Scholar. I find this a bit annoying, partly because it makes the real citations harder to see, and partly because it just looks strange and unprofessional. In the worst case (though this seems unlikely), it could even raise implicit questions, since these kinds of citations can be bought. Has anyone else encountered this phenomenon, and is there anything that can be done about it?
I’ve never gone through my Google Scholar to look, but I expect that this sort of thing is common given the number of predatory journals out there and (baffling-to-me) willingness of some people to publish with them. I don’t know if there’s anything that can be done, given how systemic the issue probably is.
Do any readers have any helpful insights?
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