Security News > 2024 > July > Hacking Scientific Citations

Citations of scientific work abide by a standardized referencing system: Each reference explicitly mentions at least the title, authors' names, publication year, journal or conference name, and page numbers of the cited publication.

References in a scientific publication allow authors to justify methodological choices or present the results of past studies, highlighting the iterative and collaborative nature of science.

We found through a chance encounter that some unscrupulous actors have added extra references, invisible in the text but present in the articles' metadata, when they submitted the articles to scientific databases.

The result? Citation counts for certain researchers or journals have skyrocketed, even though these references were not cited by the authors in their articles.

In the journals published by Technoscience Academy, at least 9% of recorded references were "Sneaked references." These additional references were only in the metadata, distorting citation counts and giving certain authors an unfair advantage.

Some legitimate references were also lost, meaning they were not present in the metadata.

News URL

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/07/hacking-scientific-citations.html