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Researchers Discover a New Form of Scientific Fraud: Uncovering 'Sneaked References'
A recent study has exposed a method of artificially inflating citation counts through "sneaked references," which are extra citations included in metadata but not in the actual text of articles. This manipulation, uncovered in journals by Technoscience Academy, distorts citation metrics that are cri...
The Conversation reports: The investigation began when Guillaume Cabanac, a professor at the University of Toulouse, wrote a post on PubPeer, a website dedicated to post-publication peer review, in which scientists discuss and analyze publications. In the post, he detailed how he had noticed an inconsistency: a Hindawi journal article that he suspected was fraudulent because it contained awkward phrases had far more citations than downloads, which is very unusual. Google Scholar is likely to mostly rely on the article's main text to extract the references appearing in the bibliography section, whereas Crossref and Dimensions use metadata provided by publishers.
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