S.O.S., My Google Scholar profile has been hacked. What to do and how to deal with it

Abstract

In March 2026, I experienced a spam attack targeting my scientific output that directly affected my Google Scholar profile. On the one hand, I detected that an article published in 2025 had been artificially replicated across multiple entries (up to fourfold), which redirected to pages containing adult content. On the other hand, another author—affected even more extensively (with up to eight duplications of their works), following the same practice and pointing to the same type of content—was generating a collateral effect on my profile: their citations, also multiplied, were being transferred in a distorted manner, improperly inflating my total citation count and even my h-index. This note aims to explain how I addressed this situation and the actions I took until Google Scholar deindexed the fraudulent results. The purpose of this contribution to ThinkEPI is to offer a set of practical guidelines for those who may find themselves in a similar situation in the future (hopefully not).