I won't dig out examples, but I'd like to sketch the general game:
You need to have a good publication record (i.e., papers in journals and conference proceedings, some monographs with a prestigious publisher can also help). When you can't publish in high-impact journals/conferences, you lower your expectations and spread your papers over several journals/conferences, some _will_ publish you.
The next thing is to split up your research results over many papers in order to have many publications; differences between the papers are small (and you can reference to yourself, i.e., to the "bigger picture" of which this paper is a part of).
That's btw the same with grant applications: Promise much, do only 30% and have the rest as a follow-up (grant renewal).
Splitting up results over several publications and grants plus the usual academic behaviour (internal status games, academic nitpicking) delay research by 300%.
Then you can create citation cartels where you mutually reference with your colleagues.
But it's not that researchers are evil, often it's the funding source that uses those metrics (e.g., publication count) that are then gamed.
My concern -- and this is a total layman's observation -- is that if someone comes up with a good way to "spam" the academic research circuit, will we be able to tell? Most of us remember the recent Reinhart-Rogoff incident in which a massively flawed paper (think, Excel-based) wasn't challenged until a curious grad student took notice: http://phys.org/news/2013-04-excel-austerity-economics-paper...
There are other issues in all of that, but for the current discussion, I think it's enough to argue that discovery of exaggeration (the equivalent of resume padding) is still a very difficult problem in academic papers and citations. Do researchers have the tools to methodically sift out the good from the meh? It doesn't seem so. Combine that with the lack of incentive (as seems to be the case in Reinhart-Rogoff) to disprove published findings, and you have a scenario in which gaming the system seems quite doable.
> Reinhart-roghoff was not submitted to a peer reviewed journal.
Yet among 400+ other citations, it was self-cited in a paper to the American Economic Review (see google scholar,) which is peer reviewed and appears to have a code submission policy since 2004 (see wikipedia.)
Perhaps if they submitted the paper directly it would have been turned down? That would make it an even better example of how to game citation count like SEO/PageRank.
You need to have a good publication record (i.e., papers in journals and conference proceedings, some monographs with a prestigious publisher can also help). When you can't publish in high-impact journals/conferences, you lower your expectations and spread your papers over several journals/conferences, some _will_ publish you.
The next thing is to split up your research results over many papers in order to have many publications; differences between the papers are small (and you can reference to yourself, i.e., to the "bigger picture" of which this paper is a part of). That's btw the same with grant applications: Promise much, do only 30% and have the rest as a follow-up (grant renewal). Splitting up results over several publications and grants plus the usual academic behaviour (internal status games, academic nitpicking) delay research by 300%.
Then you can create citation cartels where you mutually reference with your colleagues.
But it's not that researchers are evil, often it's the funding source that uses those metrics (e.g., publication count) that are then gamed.