Cause of disappearance of citing articles from hosting platforms

Ascertain whether, in the observed cases where 32% of the articles citing the five suspicious authors became unavailable on their hosting platforms, the removals were due to post-publication moderation by the hosting services (e.g., Authorea, OSF, ResearchGate) or intentional deletion by the articles’ authors, given that Google Scholar continues to index the resulting citations.

Background

The authors created a fictional Google Scholar profile and uploaded AI-generated papers to preprint platforms. They observed that Google Scholar indexed citations from these papers and retained them even after some hosting platforms removed the content. Extending this observation, they found that for five suspicious real authors, a significant portion of citing articles were no longer available on the servers that had previously hosted them.

This raises a specific unresolved question about whether these disappearances were the result of platform-level post-moderation or deliberate actions by the authors who had uploaded the papers, which has implications for the integrity of citation metrics on Google Scholar.