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A 31 January 2013 report by Chemistry World described allegations from a study by Belgrade’s Centre for Evaluation in Science and Education (CEON) that two journals published by DRUNPP manipulated citations. The report named HealthMed and Technics Technologies Education Management (TTEM). These were allegations attributed to the CEON study—not a current investigation or a final adjudication.
What the 2013 report alleged
According to Chemistry World, CEON’s study claimed that the impact factors of HealthMed and TTEM came entirely from three sources: each journal’s citations to itself, citations exchanged between the two journals, and citations from Serbian authors. The study was also reported to have alleged that many of those citations were unjustifiable or fabricated.
The article did not publish a case-specific citation dataset sufficient to reproduce those findings independently. Its account should therefore be read as reporting what the study alleged, not as a verified count or a formal finding of misconduct. Chemistry World said the journals were listed in Web of Science and Journal Citation Reports at the time; that is a historical statement about 2013, not evidence of their present indexing.
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Chemistry World said a petition asking the Serbian government to intervene had been started in 2012. It did not provide the petition’s full text or establish its outcome. The report’s author, Mićo Tatalović, said the editors of the two journals did not respond to requests for comment.
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Pero Šipka, then CEON’s head and the study’s author, called for the journals to be removed from indexing services and for Serbian authorities to stop recognizing papers from them and take action against authors he considered heavily involved. Those were recommendations, not evidence that every proposed measure was carried out. Šipka also said Serbia’s National Council for Science and Technology Development had suspended papers published in the journals, while consequences for authors remained undetermined. The account is Šipka’s statement as quoted in the 2013 report; it does not establish current Serbian policy.
A 2014 commentary in Biomolecules and Biomedicine referred to claims involving two journals published in Bosnia and Herzegovina where Serbian researchers regularly published. That provides regional context, but it is not an independent verification of CEON’s analysis.
Why unusual citation patterns do not prove a cartel
A citation cartel is an allegation of coordinated citation exchange intended to inflate measures such as journal impact factors. A high self-citation rate, reciprocal citations, or a dense cluster of journals can be warning signs, but those patterns alone do not establish coordination, intent, or misconduct. Field conventions and shared research communities can also produce connected citation patterns.
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A later peer-reviewed study by Sadamori Kojaku, Giacomo Livan, and Naoki Masuda presented CIDRE, a method for detecting anomalous groups in journal citation networks. Rather than treating every observed exchange as suspicious, the method compares network patterns with a null model that accounts for journal size and research-community structure. Its output identifies statistical anomalies; it does not by itself prove a cartel. The authors explicitly cautioned that some anomalous patterns were not the result of citation cartels.
What the later study measured—and what it did not
The study built yearly journal citation networks for 2000–2019 using a Microsoft Academic Graph snapshot released on 30 January 2020. Its analysis covered 48,821 journals. It detected 11 of 22 groups of journals suspended by JCR in the year of suspension or earlier, using the study’s stated overlap criterion. These figures describe the method’s general evaluation, not HealthMed or TTEM.
The authors also identified seven groups in 2019 but refrained from calling unvalidated groups cartel candidates. In several examples, within-group citations increased impact factors by 17–130%; those examples are not findings about the Bosnian journals. The paper’s qualification is central: without ground-truth validation, an anomalous group cannot automatically be labeled a cartel.
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What is still unknown about HealthMed and TTEM
The sources cited here do not establish whether either journal is currently publishing or indexed, whether DRUNPP’s ownership or editorial arrangements have changed, or whether an independent later analysis confirmed or refuted CEON’s specific claims. They also do not establish whether formal findings against named authors followed. The 2013 account cannot answer those present-day questions.
For readers evaluating a citation-manipulation claim, distinguish the type of evidence (journalistic account, underlying data, or detection method), what is being measured (self-citation, pairwise exchange, or a multi-journal network), the baseline and controls, the time period covered, and whether the evidence demonstrates only an anomaly or supports a conclusion about coordination and intent.
Quick Recap
Sources
- Chemistry World, 31 January 2013: Mićo Tatalović’s contemporaneous account of the CEON study’s allegations, recommendations, and quoted responses.
- Scientific Reports, 15 July 2021: Kojaku, Livan, and Masuda’s peer-reviewed CIDRE study. The article was updated after an author correction on 29 August 2022; it is methodological context, not an audit of HealthMed or TTEM.
- Biomolecules and Biomedicine: contextual commentary from circa 2014, not independent proof of the allegations.
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