PeerTrust Finds Elevated Citation-Forensic Profiles in Recent Highly Cited Research
Youssef Ali, Hla Basuni, Ahmed Kamal, Patrick Haley, Bassem Kadry, Khalid Saqr
Abstract
Publication and citation metrics influence funding, hiring, partnerships, institutional rankings, and investment decisions, but strategic citation practices can make bibliometric success difficult to interpret. We benchmarked PeerTrust, a public researcher-level screening tool that flags unusual coauthor-citation concentration, reciprocal citation, and publication-burst patterns. We constructed a deliberately citation-enriched challenge cohort by scanning OpenAlex across subfields for non-retracted journal articles published from 1 January 2025 to the sampling date, requiring at least five citations and top-1% field/year/type-normalized citation performance, and retaining up to 200 papers. We then conservatively resolved ORCIDs for first and explicitly designated corresponding authors,
yielding 268 unique researchers. An independent team reimplemented the public methodology in Python, and both engines analyzed identical cached source responses to eliminate bibliographic drift. Of the 268 ORCIDs, 260 were resolved and scored. Verdicts agreed for all 260; 258 (99.2%) matched exactly across all benchmarked outputs, while two showed minor numerical differences that did not alter their verdicts. Among scored researchers, 115 (44.2%) crossed the reciprocal-citation-pact threshold, 87 (33.5%) crossed the publication-burst threshold, 52 (20.0%) crossed both, and 116 (44.6%) received an ELEVATED or HIGH verdict. One researcher crossed the coauthor-citation-isolation threshold. These signals neither establish misconduct nor estimate population prevalence. They demonstrate reproducible, identity-resolved citation-forensic screening for integrity-aware scientific due diligence.