Scientific papers are the recordkeepers of progress in research. Each year researchers publish millions of papers in more than 3

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问题     Scientific papers are the recordkeepers of progress in research. Each year researchers publish millions of papers in more than 30,000 journals. The scientific community measures the quality of those papers in a number of ways, including the perceived quality of the journal (as reflected by the title’s impact factor) and the number of citations a specific paper accumulates. The careers of scientists and the reputation of their institutions depend on the number and prestige of the papers they produce, but even more so on the citations attracted by these papers.
    In recent years, there have been several episodes of scientific fraud, including completely made-up data, massaged or doctored figures, multiple publications of the same data, theft of complete articles, plagiarism of text, and self-plagiarism. And some scientists have come up with another way to artificially boost the number of citations to their work.
    Citation cartels, where journals, authors, and institutions conspire to inflate citation numbers, have existed for a long time. In 2016, researchers developed an algorithm to recognize suspicious citation patterns, including groups of authors that disproportionately cite one another and groups of journals that cite each other frequently to increase the impact factors of their publications. Recently, another expression of this predatory behavior has emerged: so-called support service consultancies that provide language and other editorial support to individual authors and to journals that sometimes advise contributors to add a number of citations to their articles and the articles of colleagues. Some of these consultancies are also active in organizing conferences and can advise that citations be added to conference proceedings. In this manner, a single editor can drive hundreds of citations in the direction of his own articles or those of colleagues that may be in his circle.
    The advent of electronic publishing and authors’ need to find outlets for their papers resulted in thousands of new journals. The birth of predatory journals wasn’t far behind. These journals can act as milk cows where every single article in an issue may cite a specific paper or a series of papers. In some instances, there is absolutely no relationship between the content of the article and the citations. The peculiar part is that the journal that the editor is supposedly working for is not profiting at all—it is just providing citations to other journals. Such practices can lead an article to accrue more than 150 citations in the same year that it was published.
    How insidious is this type of citation manipulation? In one example, an individual— acting as author, editor, and consultant—was able to use at least 15 journals as citation providers to articles published by five scientists at three universities. The problem is rampant in Scopus, a citation database, which includes a high number of the new "international" journals. In fact, a listing in Scopus seems to be a criterion to be targeted in this type of citation manipulation.
    Scopus itself has all the data necessary to detect this malpractice. Red flags include a large number of citations to an article within the first year. And for authors who wish to steer clear of citation cartel activities: when an editor, a reviewer, or a support service asks you to add inappropriate references, do not oblige and do report the request to the journal.
The support service consultancies tend to_________.

选项 A、recommend journals to their clients
B、list citation patterns for their clients
C、ask authors to include extra citations
D、advise contributors to cite each other

答案C

解析 由题干中的The support service consultancies定位到第三段,其中提到“最近,这种掠夺性行为以另一种表现形式出现了:所谓的为个体作者和期刊提供语言和其他编辑支持的支持服务咨询公司(期刊有时会建议投稿人在其文章和其同事的文章中添加一些引文)”,选项C是对原文的同义转述,故正确答案为C。文中提到The support service consultancies会为个体作者和期刊提供语言和其他编辑支持,并不会为它们的客户推荐期刊,A选项属于无中生有,故排除。文中涉及citation patterns的内容为“研究人员开发了一种算法,可以识别可疑的引用模式,包括那些不成比例地相互引用的作者们和那些频繁引用彼此的期刊来增加其出版物影响因子的期刊组”,但这与The support service consultancies毫无关系,故排除B选项。文中说的是“期刊有时会建议投稿人在其文章和其同事的文章中添加一些引文”,而并非The support service consultancies建议投稿人彼此引用,故排除 D选项。
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