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 function of the "milk cow" to journals is to_________.

选项 A、boost citation counts for certain authors
B、help scholars publish articles at low cost
C、instruct first-time contributors in citation
D、increase the readership of new journals

答案A

解析 根据题干中的milk cow定位到第四段,其中提到掠夺性期刊随后出现。这些期刊可以像奶牛一样,每期的每篇文章都可以引用一篇特定的论文或一系列论文,那么也就是说“milk cow"的出现就是为了增加特定论文的引用数,故正确答案为A。文中提到编辑所效劳的期刊根本没有盈利,但是这并不代表“milk cow”会帮助学者在发表文章时花更少的费用,故排除 B 选项。文中并未提到 first-time contributors,属于无中生有,故排除 C选项。文中只是在说会增加引用数,这与选项 D 中的 readership(读者人数)毫无关系,故排除 D 选项。
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