In the scientific world, gold medals can be bought, like a common pipette, from unscrupulous actors. This is according to a team from New York University, based in Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates), first shown in a preprint under review by a journal, mentioned by Nature in August. He asked a company that does not sell the “medals” directly, but a doping product that allows obtain, i.e. quotes. These are references to authors and their articles that you have found useful for your own work. They are indicated in the bibliography. In return, we hope that your text will be cited by others, thus establishing your reputation.
the counting of Citations have become one of the main criteria for evaluating researchers, journals or research institutions, while attracting their share of criticism. “Tricks” to boost your CV have flourished: citing yourself, suggesting to your colleagues that they add your articles as references, dividing a work into several self-cited articles…
“We had encountered suspicious cases of manipulation and wanted to study more deeply how certain profiles accumulate appointments”“Explains Yasir Zaki, a professor and researcher in Abu Dhabi. With 300 dollars (270 euros), his team quickly obtained fifty citations for the benefit of a fictitious researcher, from a fictitious university, created for the experiment and who had written (thanks to ChatGPT) twenty articles on the subject of fake news. This bonus of fifty citations comes from only five articles, four of which were published in a chemistry journal, probably infiltrated by the company to easily pass off articles. The researchers also suspect that this entire system was used to improve the ranking of other clients. “We were surprised to see how far the indicators could be manipulated”says Talal Rahwan, also a professor in Abu Dhabi. “We accept it, now we have confirmation”, says Cyril Labbé, a computer science professor at the University of Grenoble-Alpes, who also created a fictitious profile and fake articles in 2010 that increased his number of citations.
Fake articles
The preprints of the researchers at New York University go beyond this “successful” experiment. First, by surveying 574 scientists from the ten largest universities in the world, they discovered that 60% of respondents evaluate candidates based on citations. An identical proportion use the Google Scholar tool for this, rather than its commercial competitors, Web of Science or Scopus. However, the latter are based on a corpus of about twenty thousand journals, therefore much more limited than Google Scholar, which also collects preprint sites, researchers, specialized social networks (ResearchGate, Academia, etc.) or collaborative platforms (Open Science Framework or OSF, Authorea, etc.). This is where the flaws lie.
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