Manipulating Google Scholar Citations and Google Scholar Metrics: simple, easy and tempting

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how easily Google Scholar Citations and Metrics can be manipulated through creating false documents to artificially inflate citation counts and impact metrics, raising concerns about their reliability.

Contribution

The study provides an experimental proof of concept showing how malicious manipulation of Google Scholar profiles can significantly alter bibliometric indicators.

Findings

Creation of false documents increased citations by 774

Manipulation affected authors' and journals' H index

Highlights lack of control tools for preventing such manipulation

Abstract

The launch of Google Scholar Citations and Google Scholar Metrics may provoke a revolution in the research evaluation field as it places within every researchers reach tools that allow bibliometric measuring. In order to alert the research community over how easily one can manipulate the data and bibliometric indicators offered by Google s products we present an experiment in which we manipulate the Google Citations profiles of a research group through the creation of false documents that cite their documents, and consequently, the journals in which they have published modifying their H index. For this purpose we created six documents authored by a faked author and we uploaded them to a researcher s personal website under the University of Granadas domain. The result of the experiment meant an increase of 774 citations in 129 papers (six citations per paper) increasing the authors and journals H index. We analyse the malicious effect this type of practices can cause to Google Scholar Citations and Google Scholar Metrics. Finally, we conclude with several deliberations over the effects these malpractices may have and the lack of control tools these tools offer