In academia you get frequent information when articles you (co-)authored get cited in new publications from aggregators like Web of Science, Scopus or Google Scholar. I have been a bit suprised when I saw myself cited in an article about othodontic treatment, as this is not anywhere near my area of expertise. So I decided to investigate and found a prime example of an academic fallacy promoted by the need to accumulate citations – meaningless self-citations.

Let’s have a look, the context in which an article I co-authored gets cited reads like this:

For the in vitro studies, we adapted the quality assessment strategy proposed by Golbach et al. (2016) [58] and widely used by others [59,60], and a set of criteria was established to evaluate their methodological quality.

^​1​, page 3

Now let’s unpack this. What this sentence actually says is that other people have performed meta-studies^​2​, which in general is nothing unusual and that the same technique has been used in other studies^​3,4​. There are a couple of things to note here:

• widely used by others refers to two studies of one of the authors of the current study, i.e., a principle investigator told his assistant to do metastudies on different topics, publishes them and uses them as indicators for wide use – conveniently citing two of his own papersN
• Neither ^​3​ nor ^​4​ do even cite ^​2​ as the reference for the used strategy as ^​2​ does not even claim to propose a strategy, instead ^​3​ , the article I have been involved refers to the more meaningful reference^​5​ and just describes the way the search was carried out as is common for metastudies

In conclusion – the citations are utterly meaningless in their respective context but boost the citation count of the involved authors which in turn is an indicator for scientific prowess. Due to some recent scandals some university seem to reverse course in this respect and one can only hope that this catches on.