Research Article (preprint): “Detection of Metadata Manipulations: Finding Sneaked References in the Scholarly Literature”

The article (preprint) linked below was recently posted on arXiv.

Title

Detection of Metadata Manipulations: Finding Sneaked References in The Scholarly Literature

Authors

Lonni Besançon
Linköping University, Norrköping, Sweden

Guillaume Cabanac
Universit´e Toulouse

Cyril Labbé
Univ. Grenoble Alpes

Alexander Magazinov
Yandex.Kazakhstan

Jules di Scala
Universit´e Toulouse

Dominika Tkaczyk
Crossref

Kathryn Weber-Boer
Digital Science

Source

via arXiv

DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2501.03771

Note: Started late Summer 2024, version of January 8, 2025. Submitted to Journal of the Association for Information Science and and Technology.

Abstract

We report evidence of a new set of sneaked references discovered in the scientific literature. Sneaked references are references registered in the metadata of publications without being listed in reference section or in the full text of the actual publications where they ought to be found. We document here 80,205 references sneaked in metadata of the International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology (IJISRT). These sneaked references are registered with Crossref and all cite — thus benefit — this same journal. Using this dataset, we evaluate three different methods to automatically identify sneaked references. These methods compare reference lists registered with Crossref against the full text or the reference lists extracted from PDF files. In addition, we report attempts to scale the search for sneaked references to the scholarly literature.

Direct to Abstract + Link to Full Text Article

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