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So how does the fraud work? Researcher wants to boost his citation count so they can get more funding, respect, etc. They ask their friends to cite their paper

by rdtsc 2y ago

So how does the fraud work? Researcher wants to boost his citation count so they can get more funding, respect, etc. They ask their friends to cite their paper in a metadata-only reference in their other papers, even though the papers didn't really reference anything from the original paper. They should be able to find citation "rings" then, whole groups which regularly do this, probably associated with specific institutions or journals. The linked study did part of this: https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.24896 https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.2489... > An analysis of the 10 sneaked references in Dimensions reveals that they benefit mainly two authors (Initials JNR & BK) Now, it would be interesting to see if JNR and BK's publications used this trick and in turn benefitted, some other group.

orochimaaru 2y ago
Does LaTeX allow this to happen? Maybe a simple typesetting change to exclude references that are not mentioned in the text? This is a problem with the journal review and editors. Also, typesetting tools that create the final version can and should be setup to protect things like these. I know folks may want to go hunt for sexy genai tooling to solve this - but I think the solution is much simpler.
- resoluteteeth 2y ago
  > Does LaTeX allow this to happen? Maybe a simple typesetting change to exclude references that are not mentioned in the text? > This is a problem with the journal review and editors. Also, typesetting tools that create the final version can and should be setup to protect things like these. I know folks may want to go hunt for sexy genai tooling to solve this - but I think the solution is much simpler. The issue in the article isn' a paper being listed in the references but not actually cited elsewhere of the paper; it's not something within the actual paper at all. It's metadata created by the publisher. So it presumably doesn't have anything to do with what latex allows or doesn't allow.
resoluteteeth 2y ago
> So how does the fraud work? Researcher wants to boost his citation count so they can get more funding, respect, etc. They ask their friends to cite their paper in a metadata-only reference in their other papers, even though the papers didn't really reference anything from the original paper. This is probably the publisher's doing rather than the author of the paper.
- bigiain 2y ago
  Do the publishers actually _do_ anything? (Apart from invoicing academic institutions and demanding unpaid work from peer reviewers, of course). Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest to find they demanded authors create/submit the metadata with the references in it, and that it never gets shown to the unpaid peer reviewers, and is never checked by anybody.

by rdtsc 2y ago

orochimaaru 2y ago

Does LaTeX allow this to happen? Maybe a simple typesetting change to exclude references that are not mentioned in the text? This is a problem with the journal review and editors. Also, typesetting tools that create the final version can and should be setup to protect things like these. I know folks may want to go hunt for sexy genai tooling to solve this - but I think the solution is much simpler.

resoluteteeth 2y ago
> Does LaTeX allow this to happen? Maybe a simple typesetting change to exclude references that are not mentioned in the text? > This is a problem with the journal review and editors. Also, typesetting tools that create the final version can and should be setup to protect things like these. I know folks may want to go hunt for sexy genai tooling to solve this - but I think the solution is much simpler. The issue in the article isn' a paper being listed in the references but not actually cited elsewhere of the paper; it's not something within the actual paper at all. It's metadata created by the publisher. So it presumably doesn't have anything to do with what latex allows or doesn't allow.

resoluteteeth 2y ago

> So how does the fraud work? Researcher wants to boost his citation count so they can get more funding, respect, etc. They ask their friends to cite their paper in a metadata-only reference in their other papers, even though the papers didn't really reference anything from the original paper. This is probably the publisher's doing rather than the author of the paper.

bigiain 2y ago
Do the publishers actually _do_ anything? (Apart from invoicing academic institutions and demanding unpaid work from peer reviewers, of course). Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest to find they demanded authors create/submit the metadata with the references in it, and that it never gets shown to the unpaid peer reviewers, and is never checked by anybody.