In this golden age of con men (call them “con artists”, if you are persnickety about your lingo), more of them are worming their way into the science world. Those science con men are devising new ways to manipulate things at ever-deeper professional levels. A team of detectives writes, in The Conversation, about some muck they’ve recently found. Here’s the start of their story, with a link to the entire thing. (Thanks to Monte Solomon for bringing it to our attention.)
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When scientific citations go rogue: Uncovering ‘sneaked references’
by Lonni Besançon and Guillaume Cabanac, with Thierry Viéville
A researcher working alone – apart from the world and the rest of the wider scientific community – is a classic yet misguided image. Research is, in reality, built on continuous exchange within the scientific community: First you understand the work of others, and then you share your findings.
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 article by 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….