Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Put This On My List...

Put this on my list of papers I wish I had written: Manipulating Google Scholar Citations and Google Scholar Metrics: simple, easy and tempting. I think the title is sufficiently descriptive of the content, but the idea was they created a fake researcher and posted fake papers on a real university web site to inflate citation counts for some papers.  (Apparently, Google scholar is pretty "sticky";  even after the papers came down, the citation counts stayed up...)

Actually, I'm disappointed nobody in my graduate class thought to do something like this for a project.  I suppose it's hard to do as a class project, as it's a bit time-consuming (you don't know how long you'll have to wait to get noticed), and the outcome might have been nothing.  Or maybe I haven't clarified how much fraud can lead to interesting security projects!