The accounts/authors were probably fake. I couldn’t match them to real profiles. I think the goal was to increase the citation counts of certain papers while hiding it by citing many others. With a few exceptions, the same ~150 papers were cited each time, none from the authors.

The issue was reported yesterday to ResearchGate. By the time I created the report, Google Scholar indexed about 30 other additional papers (uploaded by the same 4 accounts).

Curious to know if you’ve seen similar suspicious citations with your papers and what you did about it.
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But also:
(d) Reference lists are very similar across papers.
(f) All papers cover almost identical topics (segmentation/detection/recognition in medical imaging), far from the topic of our work.
(e) Our paper appears in the bibliography but I never saw it cited in the text.
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Some elements which raised suspicions:
(a) Papers uploaded from 4 accounts only.
(b) At least 1 paper claims a publication date in 2021, before RangeViT, and cites papers from 2025.
(c) Rate of uploads is accelerating: from 1 paper on August 20 to 19 papers on September 9.
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