The article, "Culturally-informed for designing motorcycle fire rescue: Empirical study in developing country", published in June in AIP Advances, overwhelmingly cites the work of Muhammed Imam Ammarullah, a lecturer at Universitas Pasundan in West Java, Indonesia, sometimes without obvious relevance to the text.
An anonymous tipster came across the soon-to-be retracted paper on Google Scholar, then alerted the editors at AIP Advances in June to the strange citation pattern. The journal investigated, but didn’t acknowledge a problem with the excessive citations to Ammarullah’s work in their initial response to the complaint. Instead, they identified issues with six other. After Retraction Watch asked about the 53 citations, the publisher said they had decided to pull the paper because they found those citations were also "unrelated to the subject discussed in the text."
Other papers follow the same pattern. Scientific sleuth Nick Wise has flagged 13 articles on PubPeer with an unusually high number of citations to Ammarullah’s work “shoehorned” into the text, he said. Of the 13 flagged papers, two authors of two separate papers responded to our questions. Both said an anonymous reviewer added the citations during the review process.
