Purchasing citations? The latest trend in scholarly publishing.

An article in Science on the trend of academics purchasing citations for their scholarly work quotes Naoki Masuda, professor in the Department of Mathematics who has studied anomalous citations. In academia, a researcher’s h-index and the number of citations they’ve garnered are often used for hiring and promotion decisions. “The fraudsters … can read this and relatively easily invent methods to conceal their behavior,” Masuda says. “So, the game never ends.”