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

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

by Lonni Besançon and Guillaume Cabanac

Citations of scientific work abide by a standardized referencing system: Each reference explicitly mentions at least the title, authors' names, publication year, journal or conference name, and page numbers of the cited publication. These details are stored as metadata, not visible in the article's text directly, but assigned to a digital object identifier, or DOI—a unique identifier for each scientific publication.

References in a scientific publication allow authors to justify methodological choices or present the results of past studies, highlighting the iterative and collaborative nature of science.

However, we found through a chance encounter that some unscrupulous actors have added extra references, invisible in the text but present in the articles' metadata, when they submitted the articles to scientific databases. The result? Citation counts for certain researchers or journals have skyrocketed, even though these references were not cited by the authors in their articles.

Same thing as posting a video on youtube and tagged a bunch of unrelated subjects in the description. It works both ways, boosts up the people they're tagging, but also means more people are directed to their content even though it's not warranted.

I didn't understand how an author including extra references to his own papers could cause citation counts to "skyrocket" so I checked the article. It's not what I thought.  It is the scientists working for the journals who are adding references to their own articles in the metadata of other scientists.

In the journals published by Technoscience Academy, at least 9% of recorded references were "sneaked references." These additional references were only in the metadata, distorting citation counts and giving certain authors an unfair advantage. Some legitimate references were also lost, meaning they were not present in the metadata.

In addition, when analyzing the sneaked references, we found that they highly benefited some researchers. For example, a single researcher who was associated with Technoscience Academy benefited from more than 3,000 additional illegitimate citations. Some journals from the same publisher benefited from a couple hundred additional sneaked citations.