Google Scholar must be embarrassed by news that two guys managed to submit nonsense academic papers ostensibly written by a cat called Larry which was cited by others and which led to Larry being ranked higher academically than real academics! The guys who organised this have exposed, they believe, a flaw in the highly competitive academic rating system online.
Reese Richardson a PhD candidate at Northwestern University in the US and Nick Wise, a research associate at the University of Cambridge spotted a flaw in Google Scholar’s system which allows it to be abused by third parties to promote scientists to enable them to become better ranked in the scientific community due to their papers being cited by others.
And to expose this flaw they turned their cat Larry into ‘Larry Richardson’ a mathematician. He became a rising academic star quite quickly. They created 12 fake papers that appeared to have been produced by Larry. They also produced 12 others that each cited all of Larry’s works. The word “cited” in this context means that in the other papers they referred to Larry’s academic reports. And when you do that, you are able to say that the original report is valuable because other scientists are referring to it.
This process led to Larry’s academic papers receiving 132 citations and also an h-index of 11 which means that he had 11 papers that had each been cited at least 11 times. See the end of this article for an explanation of ‘h-index’ provided by Google Gemini.
According to The Times report, a H-index of 11 is not bad. It’s higher than some real academics achieve after being in the research field for up to 20 years!
Clearly, there was a flaw in the system. Richardson said that, “The scientific enterprise has become so competitive and unequal that services have emerged to offer reputation laundering, preying on academics desperate for jobs and promotions.”
The truth is that although the academic world looks very pure and scientific, the academics themselves are highly competitive. And this has exposed a deep flaw which Google Scholar allows to flourish and perpetuates being a major search engine for academic papers online.
Richardson and Wise realised that Google Scholar was recognising bogus papers and citations as legitimate. They quickly realised it was easy to game the system.
Unscrupulous third parties online have used these vulnerabilities to make money. There are services online, on Facebook apparently, that promise to boost the careers of scientists. They achieve this by fraudulently inflating their standing on Google Scholar.
Richardson and Wise call these third parties “paper mill fraudsters”. That’s because they use easily available software to generate sham research documents which were then uploaded to ResearchGate. This is a well-known social media platform for academics but the papers uploaded are almost entirely nonsensical. However, they included precious citations of studies purportedly produced by the fraudsters’ customers. This boosted their customers’ standing in the scientific community.
It appears that some academics are using this fraudulent system to become better known and achieve a high status amongst the scientific community.
It would seem, to me, that Google Scholar is an innocent victim in this process. They are not actively trying to promote these fraudulent systems but they have apparently been abused quite extensively. The Times says that you can’t lay the blame entirely or directly at Google’s feet for allowing this to happen.
The bigger problem concerns the entire scientific enterprise. It has “created a numbers-based system that creates perverse incentives to artificially inflate markers of productivity and impact. Until we do away with citations-based rankings, and metrics [such as h-index scores] this issue will not go away.” Those are the words of Mr Richardson.
Once the news of this enlightening test began to circulate online, Google Scholar removed all of Larry the cat’s research papers and with them his citations. But Richardson said that, “Curiously Google has not removed the citations from any of the paper mills’ clientele.”
What that means is that Google has left in place all those fraudulently produced citations and ranking-enhancing documents. They’ve not tackled the wider problem. They have simply “targeted action against a cat”. Google was asked to comment by The Times newspaper but did not respond. They are embarrassed and rightly so.
I don’t want to be too harsh about Google but this is not their only failing. The search engine, in my honest opinion, is now so biased because of a hidden agenda that Bing’s search engine is far better. You may have noticed that Google’s search engine results now can sometimes only cover two pages or even one page sometimes. I think they are struggling to maintain their search engine and they want to shrink the Internet by not listing millions of websites. Perhaps their agenda is to slowly transform search results into those produced by artificial intelligence only with scant reference to the ultimate sources, the millions of websites that they no longer list. If that’s true, it is disturbing.
H-index explained:
The h-index: A Measure of Academic Impact
The h-index is a metric used to evaluate the productivity and citation impact of a researcher. It’s a single number that represents both the quantity and quality of a researcher’s published work.
How is it calculated?
A researcher has index h if h of the researcher’s papers have at least h citations each, and the other papers have no more than h citations each.
Example:
- If a researcher has 5 papers with 100, 60, 50, 40, and 30 citations, respectively, their h-index is 5. This is because they have 5 papers with at least 5 citations each.
What does it mean?
A higher h-index generally indicates a more significant impact in the researcher’s field. However, it’s important to note that:
- It’s not a perfect measure: The h-index can be influenced by factors like field, publication type, and citation practices.
- It should be used in conjunction with other metrics: A holistic evaluation of a researcher’s work requires considering factors beyond the h-index, such as the quality of publications, grant funding, and teaching contributions.
While the h-index is a useful tool, it’s essential to interpret it within its context and avoid relying solely on it to assess a researcher’s overall impact.
Jack Hetherington
In 1975, Jack Hetherington, a theoretical physicist, wrote a paper using the pronoun “we”. He was the sole contributor in reality. In an effort to boost the value of the scientific paper, Jack added his Siamese cat, FDC Willard, as a co-author. As a result, Willard has been cited a hundred and seven times by other academics.
I’m pretty sure this was what anti climate change “scientists” did. Hired and paid by the fossil fuel industry, then other anti climate change scientists who were also paid by fossil fuel industries cited each others fake science. What a racket.
Yeh, could be. It seriously undermines the scientific studies I often read online. In fact I am going to include a warning about them. I know that we can’t always rely on them but this goes further. It almost makes them unreliable.