The way the creation of the Google search engine was inspired by the traditional method for measuring the value of scholarly works, with links becoming an analogue to citations, has become one of the web’s great origin myths. And the way the new search engine set off a rush to game the system, weakening the usefulness of links as markers of value, has become a lesson in the drawbacks of what might be called the automation of judgment. Every online currency inspires its own debasement, to one degree or another.
Now, in a perverse twist, the circle is completing itself, as Google provides web tools — Google Scholar Citations and Google Scholar Metrics — for tracking and measuring the value of academic articles and other scholarly works. The new tools offer a lot of benefits, but they also provide both the temptation and the means to game the scholarly citation system. Attempts to manipulate citations aren’t new, but now it’s possible to take the shenanigans to web scale, to bring black-hat techniques of search engine optimization to the ivory tower. Nat Torkington points to a 2012 paper, “Manipulating Google Scholar Citations and Google Scholar Metrics: Simple, Easy and Tempting,” in which three Spanish scholars describe how they used fake documents from a fake researcher to skew Google Scholar rankings and measures.
Over the course of a few hours, the researchers cobbled together six documents by cutting-and-pasting text and figures from other works. All the fake documents were attributed to the same, fake author. They included in each document citations to 129 other papers that were authored or coauthored by at least one member of the “EC3″ research group to which they belong. They translated the documents into English using Google Translate. Then they created, within the University of Granada’s domain, a web page citing each of the six fake papers and including links to the full texts. At that point, they sat back and let Google take over:
Google indexed these documents nearly a month after they were uploaded, on 12 May, 2012. At that time the members of the research group [cited in the fake documents] along with the three co-authors of this paper, received an alert from GS Citations pointing out that [the fake scholar] had cited their Works. The citation explosion was thrilling, especially in the case of the youngest researchers where their citation rates were multiplied by six, notoriously increasing in size their profiles. …
The results of our experiment show how easy and simple it is to modify the citation profiles offered by Google. This exposes the dangers it may lead to in the hands of editors and researchers tempted to do “citations engineering.”
When the experiment was over, the researchers removed all trace of their work from the web, though the fake papers, and the fake author, lived on in the Google Scholar database. They conclude:
Even if we have previously argued in favour of Google Scholar as a research evaluation tool minimizing its biases and technical and methodological issues, in this paper we alert the research community over how easy it is to manipulate data and bibliometric indicators. Switching from a controlled environment where the production, dissemination and evaluation of scientific knowledge is monitored (even accepting all the shortcomings of peer review) to a environment that lacks any kind of control rather than researchers’ consciousness is a radical novelty that encounters many dangers. … [The Google tools] do not only awaken the Narcissus within researchers, but can unleash malpractices aiming at manipulating the orientation and meaning of numbers as a consequence of the ever growing pressure for publishing fuelled by the research evaluation exercises of each country.
Google, of course, only provides the temptation. It doesn’t force anyone to give in to it. Maybe, in the end, we’ll come to discover that Google was put on this earth to test our ethical mettle. That would give a deeper resonance to the origin myth.
Photo by Carlos Castillo.