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When Scientific Citations Go Rogue: Uncovering ‘Sneaked References’

cross-posted from: midwest.social/post/14413106

Reading and writing articles published in academic journals and presented at conferences is a central part of being a researcher. When researchers write a scholarly article, they must cite the work of peers to provide context, detail sources of inspiration and explain differences in approaches and results. A positive citation by other researchers is a key measure of visibility for a researcher’s own work.

But what happens when this citation system is manipulated? A recent Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology articleby our team of academic sleuths – which includes information scientists, a computer scientist and a mathematician – has revealed an insidious method to artificially inflate citation counts through metadata manipulations: sneaked references.

Floey ,

Are people using what is essentially old Google Pagerank to determine how relevant articles are? It should be known by now that such a system is highly abusable.

ericjmorey ,

Citation count has been and continues to be the defacto measure of research importance.

ArcticDagger ,

Here’s an actual explanation of the ‘sneaked reference’:

However, we found through a chance encounter that some unscrupulous actors have added extra references, invisible in the text but present in the articles’ metadata, when they submitted the articles to scientific databases. The result? Citation counts for certain researchers or journals have skyrocketed, even though these references were not cited by the authors in their articles.

Hamartiogonic ,
@Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz avatar

Very sneaky! So basically some people have found an exploit in this game. Are the devs going to patch it any time soon? If not, this could become the next meta.

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