Retraction Watch | Demianastur/iStock
What O’Brien, Liebel, Baltes and others ended up finding was a series of fake articles across multiple preprint servers, plagiarized from real articles and attributed to authors who don’t exist. These papers seem to be designed to inflate citation counts of someone being cited. But who uploaded them to the servers is unclear, and the researchers who benefit the most from the citations have denied any involvement, saying they themselves have flagged the articles to publishers.