(12 Feb 2024) Unscrupulous researchers have many options for gaming citations metrics, new study highlights.
In 2023, a new Google Scholar profile appeared online featuring a researcher no one had ever heard of. Within a few months, the scientist, and expert in fake news, was listed by the scholarly database as their field’s 36th most cited researcher. They had an h-index of 19 – meaning they’d published 19 academic articles that had been cited at least 19 times each. It was an impressive burst onto the academic publishing scene.
But non of it was legitimate. The researcher and their institution were fictional, created by researchers at New York University (NYU) Abu Dhabi who were probing shady publishing practices. The publications were written by ChatGPT. And the citation numbers were bogus: Some came from the author excessively citing their own “work,” while 50 others had been purchased for $300 from a vendor offering a “citations booster service.”
Read more on AAAS here.
