Science Communication: Flawed Citation Indexing

摘要

We used a strategy similar to the one used by J. Bohannon ("Who's afraid of peer review?," News, special section on Communication in Science, 4 October, p. 60) to uncover the dangers encountered in open-access bibliometric tools offered by Google Scholar. We uploaded fake documents authored by a nonexisting researcher to the Web to test the capacity of Google Scholar Citations and Metrics to detect false documents and citations. As a result of these documents, the number of citations received by our research group was boosted, affecting the Google Scholar profile of 47 researchers and 52 journals (1). The main problem is that these tools rely on automatic indexing, retrieving any document uploaded to an academic Web domain. The controlled environment in which scientific knowledge is reasonably well controlled by peer review and journal selection processes has shifted toward an open environment in which we rely on our trust in each individual researcher's conscience.