science

14061 readers

745 users here now

just science related topics. please contribute

note: clickbait sources/headlines aren't liked generally. I've posted crap sources and later deleted or edit to improve after complaints. whoops, sry

Rule 1) Be kind.

lemmy.world rules: https://mastodon.world/about

I don't screen everything, lrn2scroll

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

When Scientific Citations Go Rogue: Uncovering ‘Sneaked References’ (www.discovermagazine.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

4 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

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.