The cat scientist’s fake articles received more than 130 citations in the international scientific platform. This shows serious flaws in the system of evaluating publications in scientific journals. Scientific citation systems are a part of science that remains hidden from ordinary people but is important in a scientist’s career.
It is believed that the inclusion of a researcher’s work in other scientific works reflects their importance. The more citations, the more important the results of the published research are. This helps many scientists advance their careers and receive well-deserved bonuses.
The Hirsch index is often used to evaluate the importance of an author and their articles. This indicator reflects the number of works a scientist has published and the number of times these works have been cited in other studies. For example, a scientist who has written 10 articles, each of which has been cited at least 10 times, will have a Hirsch index of 10. But are today’s citation evaluation systems so objective?
This question was answered by Reese Richardson, a graduate student at the Department of Metascience and Computational Biology at Northwestern University (USA), and Nick Wise, an expert in finding violations in scientific research. They conducted a funny experiment: they created a fake profile of a scientist and published his “research” on the ResearchGate website, a popular scientific and informative social network. Why is the experiment funny? Because this scientist’s name is Larry and he is a cat.
The experimenters published 12 mathematics papers under Larry Richardson’s name and recorded 12 other fictitious authors “citing” each one. This resulted in 12 studies with 12 citations each, giving Larry a Hirsch index of 12.
Later, Google Scholar, a search resource for scientific publications, filtered Lara’s fake research. However, it failed to do so and only recognized one article as fake. So the cat has 11 scientific articles and 132 citations out of 144 outputs. The mentions of Larry’s articles were published for a week until Google Scholar removed them. However, the cat scientist’s profile can still be found on the search engine.
The authors of the experiment described what inspired this experiment. Recently, services have appeared that offer scientists the opportunity to artificially increase the citation rate and the Hirsch index. On the ResearchGate platform, for a fee, an “article” is published, usually a nonsensical text, citing the work of a scientist who decided to increase the Hirsch index by dishonest means. The text is then deleted, leaving the citation of the user of this service. An advertisement for one of these services led researchers to the idea that even a cat can be a highly cited scientist.
By the way, Wise and Richardson were not the first to come up with the idea of creating a fake scientist profile for the sake of an experiment. In 2010, computer scientist Cyril Labbe published the scientific work of a researcher named Ike Antkare (I don’t care – I don’t care, according to English) in Google Scholar. As a result, the “researcher” became the sixth most cited person among computer scientists in the Google Scholar system.
These experiments aren’t just fun for aspiring scientists. They show that modern systems for evaluating the importance of scientific studies and their authors are flawed. According to Nick Wise, it’s impossible to create a metric that can’t be fooled. Perhaps the commonly accepted evaluation systems are outdated and in need of revision, or perhaps they should be abandoned altogether.
Source: Port Altele
