L’The image of the researcher who works alone, ignoring the scientific community, is just a myth. Research is based on a permanent exchange, first and foremost to understand the work of others and, secondly, to make one’s own results known. Reading and writing articles published in scientific journals or conferences are therefore at the heart of researchers’ activity.
When writing an article, it is fundamental to cite the work of your peers, whether to describe a context, detail your own sources of inspiration or even explain the differences in approaches and results. Being cited by other researchers, when it is for “good reasons”, is therefore one of the measures of the importance of one’s own results. But what happens when this citation system is manipulated? Our recent study reveals an insidious method of artificially inflating citation counts: “stealth references.”
The underside of manipulation
The world of scientific publication and its functioning, as well as its potential shortcomings and their causes are recurring subjects of popular science. However, let us focus particularly on a new type of drift affecting citations between scientific articles, supposed to reflect the intellectual contributions and influences of a cited article on the citing article.
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