Is Your Google Scholar Profile Looking A Bit Empty? Need To Bulk Up Your Citations? Simple – Buy Some

Scams

from the that's-not-how-it-works dept

Techdirt has been reporting on the rotten state of academic publishing for more than ten years. Abuses include publishers willing to publish anything for a fee, and the sale of nonsense papers so that they can be used to bulk up an academic’s CV. But the world moves on, and Nature has a report about a new way to boost the number of citations claimed by a researcher: simply buy them. This latest academic publishing scam was discovered as a result of an investigation carried out by Yasir Zaki, a computer scientist at New York University Abu Dhabi, and his team. Nature explains:

In their sting operation, Zaki and his colleagues created a Google Scholar profile for a fictional scientist and uploaded 20 made-up studies that were created using artificial intelligence.

The team then approached a company, which they found while analysing suspicious citations linked to one of the authors in their data set, that seemed to be selling citations to Google Scholar profiles. The study authors contacted the firm by e-mail and later communicated through WhatsApp. The company offered 50 citations for $300 or 100 citations for $500. The authors opted for the first option and 40 days later 50 citations from studies in 22 journals — 14 of which are indexed by scholarly database Scopus — were added to the fictional researcher’s Google Scholar profile.

The rise of preprints as an alternative to traditional academic publishing has made this kind of fraud easier, Zaki’s research suggests. Preprints are simple to generate, and aren’t generally peer-reviewed, so it is easy to write them to order and slip in bogus citations.

But the larger problem is the way academics are evaluated when applying for jobs or being considered for promotion. An important metric is often an academic’s citation count. As part of their study, Zaki and his colleagues surveyed 574 researchers working at the ten highest-ranked universities in the world. The responses indicated that of those universities that look at citation counts when evaluating scientists, more than 60% obtain this data from Google Scholar.

There will always be unscrupulous researchers who try to game the system of academic evaluations, and others willing to help for a fee. As many scholars have been arguing for years, the real solution to all these abuses is not to tackle them piecemeal, but to change the entire system of academic appraisals. Another benefit of doing so would be to break the stranglehold that journals with high “impact factors” have on the scholarly world. That would allow an open access title to compete for papers based on its merits, not on its perceived importance for career progression.

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Filed Under: academic publishing, citations, google scholar, impact factors, nature, open access, peer review, preprints, whatsapp
Companies: google