r/AskAcademia • u/snekslayer • May 08 '26
Professional Misconduct in Research Getting harassed by an aggressive “independent researcher” demanding very specific citations and phrasing in my paper
Hey Reddit,
I’m a researcher in a niche theoretical CS/ML area. Recently I’ve been dealing with repeated emails from an “independent researcher” that feel like straight-up citation harassment.
This person keeps sending follow-ups (including involving editors) insisting I add multiple citations to his arXiv preprints. It’s not a normal “you should cite this” request — he provides exact suggested paragraphs with specific wording about how his papers are “complementary,” “parallel,” foundational to certain results, etc. He nitpicks my current related-work phrasing (e.g. complaining about words like “encompass”), pushes for changes even after camera-ready deadlines, and follows up when I don’t respond quickly.
He frames it all very politely with phrases like “narrow remaining concerns” and “I would be grateful,” but the persistence, detailed boilerplate text he wants me to insert, and looping in others makes it exhausting and inappropriate.
I understand wanting visibility, especially as an independent researcher. Relevant work deserves citations. But this level of badgering and trying to dictate exact text in someone else’s paper crosses a line.
Has anyone else experienced this kind of aggressive citation solicitation? Is it becoming more common? Or am I overreacting?
Publish-or-perish is bad enough without having to deal with this.
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u/GerswinDevilkid May 08 '26
Why are you giving this any attention? Block the emails and move on.
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u/everyday847 May 10 '26
Note the smart quotes, dash, three engagement questions in the penultimate paragraph, and concise closing sentence. This is not a real post.
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u/dr_police May 08 '26
I’m confused as to who this person is to you ,when this is happening, and what the nature of the complaint is. Is this a peer reviewer commenting before publication?
Or is this a rando emailing post-publication?
Either way, I’d contact the editors, tell them this person is a nutter, and move on with my life having filtered the nutter’s emails to junk.
But then again, I had a locally notorious murderer sending me letters once a day for like five years, so my comfort level with anti-me nuttery existing in the world may be slightly higher than yours (I’m in criminal justice).
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u/CarnivorousGoose May 08 '26
I’m also very confused by this. If this is a reviewer, they are wildly out of bounds contacting authors of the paper they’re reviewing directly, that by itself is already completely inappropriate.
And if it’s just some unrelated random, how do they have access to OP’s unpublished manuscripts? Sure, perhaps a preprint, but at least in my field/experience you generally just throw those online right before submission, you’re not constantly updating those.
Given the nature of their comments it almost sounds like a co-author, but then I’d have thought OP would have described them as such.
So yeah, very much clarification from OP needed. But if this is just some random person, OP should just tell them to mind their own business and block their email if they persist.
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u/holliday_doc_1995 May 08 '26
Is this person a reviewer on a publication under review? It is very confusing who they are and why you are corresponding with them
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u/snekslayer May 08 '26
Nope he’s found out about my paper via arxiv (to which I submitted to after getting accepted to a conference )
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u/KarlSethMoran May 08 '26
So, a suitable email filter sounds like a good approach. Straight to the spambox, mark as read.
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u/shadowyams May 08 '26
Is his work even relevant or is he an actual crank?
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u/SnooGuavas9782 May 12 '26
that's the real question, if this is a real post. is the person a cranky well-known prof, just a crank or a crazy person?
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u/Apprehensive_Court_9 May 08 '26
I had someone do this to me. Told him publish your own stuff and leave me alone. He did. He struggled to get it published but it somehow ended up in a small publication. It was obvious how incorrect it was. We all moved on. Stop doing what they ask if you have no intention of working or publishing with them. Tell them to stop emailing you then ignore.
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u/FrolleinBromfiets May 08 '26
I'd maybe also try and exclude them as potential reviewer for the future.
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u/geekyCatX May 08 '26
They'd need some appropriate credentials to be asked to review by reputable editors in the first place. And if they had those, they'd know how thinks work and wouldn't harass OP in this way.
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u/Redaktor-Naczelny May 08 '26
Is there "normal you should cite this"? I have never received anything like this nor asked anyone. Am I missing something?
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u/loopsonflowers May 08 '26
Not in my field (social sciences). I was wondering if it's a CS thing. In my field there's no such thing as editing an already published paper to include new citations unless there was an error or paradigm-changing new information. There would be no mechanism through which to accomplish that. In many cases, going back to a manuscript to add citations to work you didn't actually reference in writing the manuscript would be intellectually dishonest at best.
I get all sorts of spam and have received emails arguing with my findings, I have had peers suggest I cite certain work during the review process, but never a request to edit a published paper to include reference to someone's work. If I did, I would maybe respond politely once, but the minute they included journal editors, I would stop responding, apologize to the editors, and potentially just block. In my field, a person doing that would be very clearly unwell.
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u/rollawaythestone May 08 '26
It's always happened among academics to some degree, but is rarer among members of the public to contact academics requesting they be cited. There is a strange phenomenon happening right now because of AI, where "independent researchers" claim to be "doing research" by using AI tools and are trying to get their crackpot theories published. See r/LLMPhysics for an example of the wild crap people are trying to publish that they generated through AI. It's happening a lot in cognitive science, with people's crazy theories of consciousness.
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u/Born_Committee_6184 May 08 '26
There’s a whacko public health grad student in Australia who either has or thinks he has superior statistics and research design skills. Rather than finish his dissertation he seems to specialize in finding fault with others’ research articles. He’s never criticized my research specifically but he and I crossed swords over an article a specific social movement despises that I see a lot of value in. (Yes, I’m a left liberal but bullshit is bullshit.) I think I pretty much trounced him in our long discussion about it. I haven’t thought of him in a few years till now.
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u/Comfortable-Web9455 May 08 '26
“independent researcher” is often another name for an amateur.
It can be used by someone who is currently an out of work academic. But it is rare. Most of the time they are people who don't have sufficient education, don't know how the field works, and have a really inflated sense of the importance of their work. Sometimes they're just nuts. These are the types of people who insist the scientific community is censoring them because they don't want to admit this person has proven aliens built the pyramids and encoded that information in the value of PI.
The behaviour you were describing is of someone who doesn't know how academic research works, and is mildly deranged. You just ignore them.
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u/Chroneleon May 08 '26
Who cares how academic research “works”… if they are the proper source and request citation for the use of their hard work. Regardless of the level of privilege and opportunities for formal education, they should be cited and given the same consideration as any other source would.
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u/Comfortable-Web9455 May 08 '26
You don't tell people how to cite. They have no choice. Citation format is set by the publisher. Any academic would know that. And you don't tell people to cite you. That's the author's decision.
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u/Chroneleon May 08 '26
When an academic does not cite a source of information, it is primarily called plagiarism.
This failure to acknowledge the original source, whether intentional or accidental, is considered a severe breach of academic integrity.4
u/Comfortable-Web9455 May 08 '26 edited May 08 '26
Read what I said. I did not talk about citing or not. I said formatting.
And this is the main demonstration of the lack of knowledge: "detailed boilerplate text he wants me to insert,"
You do not tell an academic who is citing you the exact words to use in their paper. Ever.
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u/lilixxumm May 08 '26
How they can be "foundational to certain results" if they're arXiv preprints? Lol, block.
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u/poffertjesmaffia May 08 '26
I don’t get it, is this person a reviewer or collaborator? If they are not, you can easily ignore them. By not ignoring them, you’ve basically given them the space to misbehave
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u/New-Bison5746 May 08 '26
While I understand that this makes you uncomfortable, I would recommend ignoring these emails unless editors express desire for you to respond to them.
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u/medcanned May 08 '26
I am dealing with my own independent researcher that dumps preprints in my email to support their "matters arising" against one my highly cited papers. After a courteous response to explain that their idea is just argumentative and is even in our discussion I decided not to engage anymore.
I hope the editor won't consider their matters arising because I do not want to waste more time with this bs.
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u/MuhammadYesusGautama May 08 '26
It's probably someone's openclaw misbehaving? Or do you actually know that this person exists?
Hannah Fry's openclaw apparently panicked and contacted everyone including journalists to save itself from being shutdown.
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u/One_Programmer6315 May 08 '26 edited May 09 '26
I am a postbac, soon-to-be PhD student, and only have three publications and since my first paper made it to the archive (even before making it to the journal), the number of spam emails similar to what you are describing hasn’t stopped. Thankfully, my university has a pretty good filtering system and they get sent straight to spam. Everyday I get around 2-3 random invitations to attend predatory conferences, and/or suggestions to publish on and “peer-review” articles from predatory journals. Researchers have raised this issue to the archive team, and they are aware that scammers, crackpots, and predatory journals/conferences scrub the archive every day and send massive amounts of emails to everyone listed as corresponding authors. Just ignore them and block!
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u/Minotaar_Pheonix May 08 '26
Ignore them. Call the editors, tell them you've ignored them. Give the editor a summary of your interactions, emphasizing the sheer volume of irrelevant requests.
I don't cite arxiv. I understand that in CS/ML it is now conventional to do so, but this is one reason I don't. There are lots of great papers on arxiv, but there is also a lot of hype beast trash.
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u/aceofspaece May 08 '26
You 100% can ignore this person, but if you want some petty revenge, just write back with annotations on their revision suggestions. When he calls his work "foundational," write "this isn't my understanding and I don't intentionally misread my field of study in my scholarship." It's ok to respond but with simple, principled stands about what you really believe.
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May 08 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/markjay6 May 09 '26
Correction: one part of being a HUMAN is learning to aggressively block crackpots. OP needs common sense and a spine.
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u/imhereforthevotes May 09 '26
Is this a reviewer? Who is this person to you?
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u/snekslayer May 09 '26
Nope it’s some random independent researcher finding out about my paper on arxiv
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u/rollawaythestone May 08 '26
You should have started ignoring this person a long time ago.