From Content Creation to Citation Inflation: A GenAI Case Study

This paper investigates the presence and impact of questionable, AI-generated academic papers on widely used preprint repositories, with a focus on their role in citation manipulation. Motivated by suspicious patterns observed in publications related to our ongoing research on GenAI-enhanced cybersecurity, we identify clusters of questionable papers and profiles. These papers frequently exhibit minimal technical content, repetitive structure, unverifiable authorship, and mutually reinforcing citation patterns among a recurring set of authors. To assess the feasibility and implications of such practices, we conduct a controlled experiment: generating a fake paper using GenAI, embedding citations to suspected questionable publications, and uploading it to one such repository (ResearchGate). Our findings demonstrate that such papers can bypass platform checks, remain publicly accessible, and contribute to inflating citation metrics like the H-index and i10-index. We present a detailed analysis of the mechanisms involved, highlight systemic weaknesses in content moderation, and offer recommendations for improving platform accountability and preserving academic integrity in the age of GenAI.