Phys.org July 10, 2024
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. An international team of researchers (Sweden, France, Kazakhstan) reported evidence of an undocumented method to manipulate citation counts involving “sneaked” references. Sneaked references are registered as metadata for published scientific articles in which they do not appear. This manipulation exploits trusted relationships between publishers, the Crossref metadata registration agency, digital libraries, and bibliometric platforms. They showed that extra undue references were sneaked in at Digital Object Identifier (DOI) registration time, resulting in artificially inflated citation counts. As a case study, focusing on three journals from a given publisher, they identified at least 9% sneaked references mainly benefiting two authors. Despite not being present in the published articles, these sneaked references exist in metadata registries and inappropriately propagate to bibliometric dashboards. Their research led to an investigation by Crossref (confirming their findings) and to subsequent corrective actions. According to the authors bibliometric platforms producing citation counts should identify, quantify, and correct these flaws to provide accurate data to their patrons and prevent further citation gaming… read more. Open access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Proactively exploring data hazards in synthetic biology research. Credit: Thomas Gorochowski, University of Bristol