Patent Filing: Citation Laundering Detection via Structural Delta Analysis in Scientific Manuscripts

Description

This record documents a system for detecting citation laundering in scientific manuscripts through structural delta analysis across revision cycles.

The approach addresses a growing integrity failure in scientific publishing in which citation manipulation occurs during reviewer response and revision phases rather than at initial submission. In such cases, references are added or rearranged without corresponding changes in methodology, data, analytical scope, or reasoning, allowing authority to substitute for evidentiary support while evading bibliometric detection.

The disclosed system compares an initial manuscript submission with one or more revised versions and evaluates whether changes in citation structure are justified by structural expansion elsewhere in the document. Citation growth that is not accompanied by expanded methods, new data, or extended analytical steps is flagged as structurally unjustified.

The method operates without assessing citation prestige, impact, network centrality, or semantic correctness. It does not assign blame, infer intent, or produce acceptance or rejection decisions. Outputs consist of non-accusatory structural diagnostics intended to support editorial audit, integrity review, and pre-publication risk assessment.

This work complements pre-review structural integrity validation by extending analysis across time, enabling publishers to detect epistemic inflation and citation laundering patterns before publication rather than through post-hoc retraction.

This publication is released as defensive prior art. Implementation details, thresholds, and scoring heuristics are intentionally omitted.

⚖️ Disclosure Notice

This repository constitutes a public technical disclosure of an invention for the purpose of establishing prior art under applicable patent and intellectual property frameworks. The disclosure is intended to prevent subsequent patenting of substantially similar subject matter by other entities.

This publication is timestamped and made permanently available via public archival platforms, including Zenodo, GitHub, and IPFS/Pinata, to preserve authorship attribution and document the structural origin of the disclosed invention.

📄 License

This repository is published for disclosure and reference purposes only.
No license to implement, reproduce, or commercialize the disclosed invention is granted by this publication.