Then there are the counterfeiters.

Meet some of the people featured in the December 2020 issue of The Scientist.

A study makes policy recommendations to optimize citations, but critics say it fails to acknowledge that citations are a biased and narrow measure of scientific success.

Male researchers are more likely to describe their work in publications using positive superlatives than their female colleagues are, a habit tied to more citations.

Small research groups tend to beat large collaborations when it comes to producing innovative projects and breakthrough discoveries.

China shows the biggest increase of any country in the number of scientists listed since last year, while cancer genomics emerges as one of the more dominant fields.

An analysis of contaminated literature finds that tens of thousands of papers used cell lines of questionable origins—and these were in turn cited by hundreds of thousands of other papers.

Authors of rescinded papers see a 10 percent to 20 percent decline in citation rates for their other publications. 

New rankings highlight institutions that have produced large numbers of articles cited in others' patents.