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 NoticeThis document constitutes a public disclosure of an invention under international patent law, intended to establish prior art and prevent subsequent patenting by other entities. This publication is timestamped and made permanently available via Zenodo/GitHub/Pinata to preserve authorship and structural origin.
Honan et al. (Wed,) studied this question.