When scientific citations go rogue: Uncovering ‘sneaked references’
Reading and writing articles published in academic journals and presented at conferences is a central part of being a researcher. When researchers write a scholarly article, they must cite the work of peers to provide context, detail sources of inspiration and explain differences in approaches and results. A positive citation by other researchers is a key measure of visibility for a researcher’s own work. But what happens when this citation system is manipulated? A recent Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology article by Lonni Besançon and Guillaume Cabanac and their team of academic sleuths – which includes information scientists, a computer scientist and a mathematician – has revealed an insidious method to artificially inflate citation counts through metadata manipulations: sneaked references.