[InetBib] FYI: Academic Search Engine Spam and Google Scholar’s Resilience Against it

[Annette Hexelschneider <hexelschneider@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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


Academic Search Engine Spam and Google Scholar’s Resilience Against it
Joeran Beel and Bela Gipp
Journal of Electronic Publishing , Volume 13, Issue 3, December 2010

This paper was refereed by the Journal of Electronic Publishing’s peer 
reviewers.

Abstract

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.

Keywords: academic search engine spam, search engines, academic search 
engines, citation spam, spamdexing, Google Scholar


   Annette Hexelschneider, Dipl.-Ing.
   Head of Knowledge and Information Management Support Unit
   European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research
   (Affiliated to the United Nations)
   Berggasse 17
   A-1090 Vienna (Austria)
   Tel: +43-1-319 45 05-23
   Fax: +43-1-319 45 05-19
   hexelschneider@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
   http://www.euro.centre.org
   http://www.euro.centre.org/hexelschneider


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