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Manipulating Google Scholar Citations and Google Scholar Metrics: simple, easy and tempting

Ironically this should be a highly cited paper  😉

Manipulating Google Scholar Citations and Google Scholar Metrics: simple, easy and tempting

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1212/1212.0638.pdf

Authors: Emilio Delgado López-Cózar,  Nicolás Robinson-García1 y Daniel Torres-Salinas

EC3: Evaluación de la Ciencia y de la Comunicación Científica

Universidad de Granada

Universidad de Navarra

[email protected]; [email protected] ; [email protected]

ABSTRACT

The launch of Google Scholar Citations and Google Scholar Metrics may provoke a revolution in the research evaluation field as it places within every researcher’s reach tools that allow bibliometric measuring. In order to alert the research community over how easily one can manipulate the data and bibliometric indicators offered by Google’s products we present an experiment in which we manipulate the Google Citations’ profiles of a research group through the creation of false documents that cite their documents, and consequently, the journals in which they have published modifying their H-index. For this purpose we created six documents authored by a faked author and we uploaded them to a researcher’s personal website under the University of Granada’s domain. The result of the experiment meant an increase of 774 citations in 129 papers (six citations per paper) increasing the authors and journals’ H-index . We analyse the malicious effect this type of practices can cause to Google Scholar Citations and Google Scholar Metrics. Finally, we conclude with several deliberations over the effects these malpractices may have and the lack of control tools these tools offer.

Stephen

 

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Posted on: March 5, 2013, 6:56 am Category: Uncategorized

By: stephen

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