Archives des mots-clés : academic search engines

Back to the past: on the shoulders of an academic search engine giant

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A study released by the Google Scholar team found an apparently increasing fraction of citations to old articles from studies published in the last 24 years (1990-2013). To demonstrate this finding we conducted a complementary study using a different data source (Journal Citation Reports), metric (aggregate cited half-life), time spam (2003-2013), and set of categories (53 Social Science subject categories and 167 Science subject categories).

Although the results obtained confirm and reinforce the previous findings, the possible causes of this phenomenon keep unclear. We finally hypothesize that first page results syndrome in conjunction with the fact that Google Scholar favours the most cited documents are suggesting the growing trend of citing old documents is partly caused by Google Scholar.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.09111

Academic Search Engine Spam and Google Scholar’s Resilience Against it

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In a previous paper we provided guidelines for scholars on optimizing research articles for academic search engines such as Google Scholar. Feedback in the academic community to these guidelines was diverse.

Some were concerned researchers could use our guidelines to manipulate rankings of scientific articles and promote what we call ‘academic search engine spam’. To find out whether these concerns are justified, we conducted several tests on Google Scholar.

The results show that academic search engine spam is indeed—and with little effort—possible: We increased rankings of academic articles on Google Scholar by manipulating their citation counts; Google Scholar indexed invisible text we added to some articles, making papers appear for keyword searches the articles were not relevant for; Google Scholar indexed some nonsensical articles we randomly created with the paper generator SciGen; and Google Scholar linked to manipulated versions of research papers that contained a Viagra advertisement.

At the end of this paper, we discuss whether academic search engine spam could become a serious threat to Web-based academic search engines.

URL : http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0013.305