Manipulatable Google Scholar Citation Counts

Citation counts are widely used to assess the impact and influence of research. Google Scholar, a popular platform for retrieving citation data, has recently come under scrutiny once again for concerns over its manipulability.

Citations Can Be Bought

A recent study published in Arxiv exposed the vulnerability of Google Scholar to citation manipulation. Researchers from New York University created a fictional author profile and purchased 50 citations for their non-existent papers, highlighting Google Scholar’s vulnerability to fraudulent citations.

The study also found evidence of citation fraud through irregular citation patterns, such as an unusually high number of citations from a limited set of papers in some Google Scholar profiles. These findings raise concerns about the reliability and accuracy of citation counts as an indicator of research impact.

The Decade-Old Citation Game

The manipulation of Google Scholar citations has been a topic of discussion since 2010, which was also around the time when the Google Scholar “My Citations” function was introduced. In 2013, a group of researchers in Spain conducted an experiment by creating and uploading six fake papers to an institutional web domain, referencing real publications by a research lab overseas. The index of these fake papers on Google Scholar caused a significant increase in the cited authors’ metrics.

Citation Cartels

In addition to citation manipulation by individuals, the emergence of citation cartels is more troubling. Recently, a news report in Science revealed that groups of mathematicians at certain universities colluded to artificially boost their colleagues’ citation counts through low-quality, predatory journal publications. The presence of citation cartels distorts citation metrics and compromises the integrity of the scientific reward system. In fact, this practice has led to the exclusion of the entire field of mathematics from Clarivate’s Highly Cited Researchers list, which subsequently harms the visibility and reputation of researchers in that field.

Self-Citations

Other than citation purchasing and citation cartels, the inability to exclude or explicitly display self-citations is another limitation noted in Google Scholar citation metrics. While self-citation is not necessarily unethical, it can contribute to a boosted citation count, making it difficult to accurately assess a researcher’s impact.

Implications

While Google Scholar citation counts serve as an important resource, the potential for manipulation undermines its reliability as impact indicators. Researchers should be aware of these manipulations and biases and platforms like Google Scholar need robust measures to prevent and detect citation fraud. Overall, the integrity of the scientific evaluation system relies on accurate and unbiased metrics.

– By Jennifer Gu, Library

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