alt Hacker NewsI ran into an interesting incident of this recently. I got a Google Scholar alert about a paper with some experiments related to a paper I had published a while ago, by one "N. Tvlg". I read the paper with interest but I started noticing that although the arguments sounded good, they didn't really make sense, and also the descriptions of the results didn't really match the figures. Eventually I came across a cluster of citations to completely unrelated papers---my field is computational linguistics and these were citations to, like, studies of battery technologies for electric cars. I looked up "N Tvlg" on Google Scholar and they had "published" several articles very recently in totally divergent fields, and upon inspection, all of them had citations back to this materials science research buried deeply somewhere. Clearly these were LLM generated papers trying to build up citation count and h-rank for someone's career.
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Where there’s a ranking, there’s someone out there trying to cheat at it. Citation count is a joke.
The purpose of scientific publication used to be to deliver useful scientific results to one's peers. This meant that everyone ran their own personal filter of which peers were working on interesting things, and which collections (journals) were reproducing the most interesting ones. This system still works relatively well for most conscientious researchers. The idea that we should also use publication metrics to rank researchers was never part of this system, and it obviously leads to all sorts of spam (that most scientists just work around) but that seems to really upset non-scientists.