Thousands of mistakenly awarded citations left uncorrected highlight the perils of leaving profile curation to academics, say critics
(17 Dec 2025) Further concerns have been raised over the reliability of Google Scholar after academics were mistakenly awarded thousands of citations that saw them top leaderboards for their discipline.
While research sleuths have repeatedly highlighted how academics can use self-citations or citation rings to increase their h-index, the rise of inaccurate listings as a result of Google Scholar’s automated process of author attributions has now been highlighted.
In some cases, this has seen Google Scholar’s subject leaderboards skewed by erroneous attributions, usually as a result of academics sharing a common surname such as Brown, Jones or Smith.
For instance, a UK-based professor of education is highly ranked in “educational leadership” research on Google Scholar, primarily because of a string of multi-authored papers on nuclear physics published between 2010 and 2021.
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