Researchers from the universities of Navarra and Granada have demonstrated the lack of rigor of the Google bibliometric tools that are increasingly used worldwide to assess the impact of scientific publications. Their work, published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technologyappears in a Letter to publisher in the latest issue of the prestigious journal Science, and warns of the ease with which false articles can be indexed in Google to increase the issue citation rate of researchers, articles and scientific journals.

This research has highlighted the Google Scholar Citations and Google Scholar Metrics tools, two Google search engines specialized in searching and measuring the scientific impact of researchers and scientific journals and whose use is spreading rapidly in the academic world.

The work has been carried out by the researchers of the University of Granada Emilio Delgado López-Cózar; Nicolás Robinson-García; and Daniel Torres-Salinas, who is also technical manager of the research in the FIMA (Foundation for Applied Medical research ) of the University of Navarra.

The Pantani-Contador fake article

The authors carried out an experiment consisting of editing a false scientific article published by an alleged researcher called framework Alberto Pantani-Contador. The text, which made no sense whatsoever, was copied and pasted from the web page of the group of research to which they belong (EC3: assessment of Science and Scientific Communication), and translated into English with Google Translator. The researchers in turn divided the fake paper into six articles, citing 129 other scientific papers in each of them.

The Pantani-Contador article was uploaded to a web page staff of the University of Granada, and Google quickly indexed it and included it in its search engines, which shows that this operation is carried out automatically, without taking into account the content of the indexed paper at all.

The authors, whom Pantani-Contador cited in his false article, saw a considerable increase in their citations in Google Scholar, especially in the case of the younger researchers, who saw a six-fold increase in their issue citations, significantly increasing their profile researcher in Google Scholar Citations. In addition, all the bibliometric indicators of the three authors increased notably, and 47 researchers and 51 journals were also affected, with increases in citations.

As explained by the main author of work published in Science, Emilio Delgado López-Cózar, Full Professor of Documentation at the University of Granada, "this experiment demonstrates how easy it can be for anyone with minimal computer skills to manipulate the products offered by Google Scholar, so widely used in the world of scientific communication".