Researchers discover a new form of scientific fraud: 'sneaked references'

More info at https://retractionwatch.com/2023/10/09/how-thousands-of-invi... and https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.02192 . As the latter makes clear, this type of fraud is most likely done by journal editors (or their assistants), not by the authors:

> When registering a new publication and its references at Crossref, a publisher may sneak extra undue references in the metadata sent in addition to the ones originally present. Then, digital libraries (e.g., SpringerLink) and bibliometric platforms (e.g., Dimensions) harvest these metadata, undue citations included. These sneaked references are processed and counted even if they are not present in the original publication.

The three journals in this particular case are all published by Technoscience Academy, an OA publisher operating out of India (not one of the well-known ones). I would think twice as an author before I submitted to any journal from this publisher, lest my paper is abused for manipulations like this (although I'm not sure if it has any journals worth submitting to anyway).

NB (because I got confused first): This is not really about Hindawi. Hindawi published the (trash) article that these fake citations were pumping up, but the pumping-up happened using Technoscience Academy journals.

Article doesn't really address why this is happening. My guess would be financial incentives for researchers and professors to publish in international journals, a common practice in some countries. For instance, according to "Analysis of Chinese universities’ financial incentives for academic publications":

In recent years payments based directly on the number of citations a paper receives have become more popular, but are still much less common than those based on the journal’s impact factor.

https://opportunities-insight.britishcouncil.org/insights-bl...

Hilarious to me how this is basically, "researchers discover SEO techniques."

They mean references cited in the metadata but not in the actual paper. So it’s “invisible” and can be gamed because some citation trackers rely on the metadata rather than having to parse the paper.

Why did it take the article 7 paragraphs to tell me what the fraud was? Ad revenue driven journalism.

>Some legitimate references were also lost, meaning they were not present in the metadata.

It's possible that some of the inconsistency between metadata and text could just be due to incompetence - it's harder to find a profit motive for dropping legitimate citations. Why wouldn't this sort of metadata auto-generated from the text (aside from enabling fraud, of course)?

I'm unclear on whether to pin this on the publisher or on the authors.

In the first example shown in the linked pre-print [1] there's a paper with 62 downloads that's been cited 107 times within two months. The pre-print looks deeper into a paper with 7 "real" references whose metadata has an extra 40 references not found in the PDF. This leaves us with three options:

  * the author of a paper with 62 downloads (not an amazing number) was convinced into joining a citation ring along with 40 other authors,
  * the publisher has been sneaking references onto unsuspecting papers, or
  * the publisher has a vulnerability on their metadata system that's being actively exploited by the two scholars identified in the pre-print.

Whatever the case, I'm glad the solution is as simple as "you should parse the references yourself". I do however wonder: is someone checking whether all of the references are actually referenced within the paper?

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.02192

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.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.

In most cases the published articles is document that has some additional metadata added during the publishing process. Hence, there's an inherent disconnect between the article and the metadata that must be examined for accuracy and truth.

Instead, the published article should really be a view of the structured data, metadata, and text (i.e. the true content) that makes up the article. Formatting and such can be a pain, but using this approach would mean the published article is a view of the truth rather than the metadata being created as something of an afterthought.

Extracting the key definition:

  These additional references were only in the
  metadata, distorting citation counts and
  giving certain authors an unfair advantage.

Papers with metadata that doesn't match the contents of the paper. The article notes that Google Scholar is unaffected, as it extracts citations from the paper itself by parsing the text of the printed bibliography.

Why isn't Hanlon's razor applicable here? Maybe for a significant number it is, and maybe not all.

The problem would be if this turns into a negative index, it can have equally bad repercussions. So attribution to malice and intent is important because there will be people adversely affected.

If this is a publisher/SEO fuckup, that needs to be seen distinct from "fraud"

Something similar hit the news in Spain recently:

https://cadenaser.com/castillayleon/2024/03/15/el-candidato-...

Trust but verify! Similar tomfoolery https://pierrekorymedicalmusings.com/p/scientific-consensus-...

so is the implication those cited are paying the publishers to add them to the metadata of the papers they publish? what is the actual mechanism?

Its SEO spam link building for academics

"I'm In!"

This would only be relevant for shit journals that use authors’ pdfs directly and don’t do their own processing.

feels like a neural net could detect these by scoring and ranking the relevance of the content of a reference paper to the content of the paper citing it. maybe it's time for a citizen science project to dismantle these academic fraud rings? they form networks that capture academic administrations and have significant downstream effects on policy and education. just by identifying the worst and most egregious offenders, leaving the merely dodgy alone, it could break up the hold they have on institutions.