Self-Cite Circus (SCC)
A story has been making the rounds about a professor who has written hundreds of articles so far in 2026, many by himself (see also Reddit, Washington Post). Apparently, Nicholas G. Polson, a respected professor at the University of Chicago, wrote (“wrote”) 258 preprints by the end of August. Thanks to AI, this is the kind of thing we’ll see more of in the future.
People are asking: why do this? What’s the motivation? And one answer I keep coming back to is getting citations.1 Posting this many papers at one time seems like a good vehicle for developing a huge number of self-citations.
Assuming you start from scratch and “write” one paper a day for a year, and each paper cites every preceding paper, then the first paper will get 364 citations, the second gets 363, and so on. This gives the total: $$\sum_{k=1}^{364} k = 364 + 363 + \cdots + 1 = \frac{364 \times 365}{2} = 66{,}430$$ That’s an incredible number of citations for a researcher to accrue in a single year!
I don’t know if this is happening in the wild, but I’m going to plant a flag and name the phenomenon:
Self-cite circus (SCC): A scheme to generate a superlinear, compounding number of citations for yourself by releasing a flood of (AI-written) self-citing articles.
The 66k total is the backwards-complete extreme of this.2
There’s some good news, though. One, at least in the case of Prof. Polson, he doesn’t seem to have engaged in high numbers of self-citations (or at least they haven’t been parsed by Google Scholar), according to his Scholar Profile page. And two, circuit breakers may stop SCCs before they even start: SSRN (which is not peer reviewed) took down all or most of Polson’s papers.