What is a 'sneaked reference'? "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." Why is this a problem? "Citation counts heavily influence research funding, academic promotions and institutional rankings." The article calls this a new form of academic fraud, which I think is a bit much, but it's certainly unethical. Personally, I don't think much of citation counts; I have often seen an idea referenced in one paper that gets a few cites and then restated in another paper, usually by a more prominent researcher, that gets a much higher citation count. But it might take AI to track 'idea origin' and attribute real, not merely counted, influence. Via Scott Leslie.
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