When Scientific Citations Go Rogue (theconversation.com) 19
The Conversation: 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.
People are becoming more aware of scientific publications and how they work, including their potential flaws. Just last year more than 10,000 scientific articles were retracted. The issues around citation gaming and the harm it causes the scientific community, including damaging its credibility, are well documented. Citations of scientific work abide by a standardized referencing system: Each reference explicitly mentions at least the title, authors' names, publication year, journal or conference name, and page numbers of the cited publication. These details are stored as metadata, not visible in the article's text directly, but assigned to a digital object identifier, or DOI -- a unique identifier for each scientific publication.
References in a scientific publication allow authors to justify methodological choices or present the results of past studies, highlighting the iterative and collaborative nature of science. 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.
People are becoming more aware of scientific publications and how they work, including their potential flaws. Just last year more than 10,000 scientific articles were retracted. The issues around citation gaming and the harm it causes the scientific community, including damaging its credibility, are well documented. Citations of scientific work abide by a standardized referencing system: Each reference explicitly mentions at least the title, authors' names, publication year, journal or conference name, and page numbers of the cited publication. These details are stored as metadata, not visible in the article's text directly, but assigned to a digital object identifier, or DOI -- a unique identifier for each scientific publication.
References in a scientific publication allow authors to justify methodological choices or present the results of past studies, highlighting the iterative and collaborative nature of science. 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.
Dupe. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Dupe. (Score:5, Funny)
Naaah. They're just trying to fraudulently up the story count.
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thieves, liars, manipulators and other psychopaths...
As "Darwin" guided our ancestors. What works, works, morality is irrelevant. :-)
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Woke scientists have hurt science a lot with all the non-sense they publish and made so called "science" reputation very low among people.
Are your referring to real degree programs or the "football player" degree programs? In the 1960s/70s various radical groups that occupied building and demanded to negotiate with the administration often demanded the creation of various ethnic or gender studies degree programs. They were creating a safe haven for themselves within the system to continue working on their "revolution" once the Vietnam War ended. The Administration often agreed to the creation of these degree programs. Why?
These "studies" d
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And this is why NSF make scientists study business (Score:2)
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...National Science Foundation...a business training program they created in partnership with various Universities....
Uhh...
Bottom line is, I like many others continue to trust science, but am really starting to distrust "scientists."
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...National Science Foundation...a business training program they created in partnership with various Universities....
Uhh...
Bottom line is, I like many others continue to trust science, but am really starting to distrust "scientists."
...National Science Foundation...a business training program they created in partnership with various Universities....
Uhh...
Bottom line is, I like many others continue to trust science, but am really starting to distrust "scientists."
Ironically, this business training is actually telling scientists to apply scientific principles to new product development. Here's the short version:
"So, you are hoping to commercialize the results of your research. Great! We are here to help. Now, that brilliant application of your research that you imagined while you were sitting around the lab or office? Flush it down the toilet like the giant turd it most likely is. Then get out of the f'n office and lab and go talk to people you imagine can benefit
Deep fakes ... (Score:3)
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sneaked dups (Score:2)
Slashdot should patent "sneaked dups".
A system comprising independent editors and involving a lack of reading, allowing multiple non-simultaneous sneaking of dups.
\o/ (Score:1)
ProTip: when survival or is extensions are tied to X, X will be sought.
Response (Score:2)
Just like web site citations (Score:2)
Wikipedia, for example, relies heavily on citations. The quality of those citations varies widely. This is why Wikipedia's editors spend so much time scrutinizing articles and sources.
New problem, or new discovery? (Score:2)
I wonder how many "schools of thought" have historically been built on a few people's opinionated work, which was then cited by others, and their work cited by yet others, until it becomes "settled" science. In the past, finding such faulty attribution trails was much harder and more laborious. It's still not easy, but the internet has exposed some of the flaws in our attribution system.
So are these problems new, or is it more that our ability to research the researchers has improved, and we're now uncoveri
Just like SEO (Score:2)
SEO is always an arms race. The search engines are always adjusting their algorithms to try to combat link spammers. The link spammers find new ways to spam the search engines to get around the new algorithms.
This is really attribution spamming. The publications have some work to do.