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Duplicate and fake publications in the scientific literature: how many SCIgen papers in computer science?

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Abstract

Two kinds of bibliographic tools are used to retrieve scientific publications and make them available online. For one kind, access is free as they store information made publicly available online. For the other kind, access fees are required as they are compiled on information provided by the major publishers of scientific literature. The former can easily be interfered with, but it is generally assumed that the latter guarantee the integrity of the data they sell. Unfortunately, duplicate and fake publications are appearing in scientific conferences and, as a result, in the bibliographic services. We demonstrate a software method of detecting these duplicate and fake publications. Both the free services (such as Google Scholar and DBLP) and the charged-for services (such as IEEE Xplore) accept and index these publications.

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Notes

  1. http://ip-science.thomsonreuters.com/news/2005-04/8272986/.

  2. Bibliographic information and corpora are available upon request to the authors.

  3. http://arxiv.org/help/endorsement.

  4. http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/.

  5. Blog post: http://pythonic.pocoo.org/2009/1/28/fun-with-scigen; SCIgen-Physics Sources: http://bitbucket.org/birkenfeld/scigen-physics/overview.

  6. http://paperdetection.blogspot.com/.

  7. http://montana.informatics.indiana.edu/cgi-bin/fsi/fsi.cgi.

  8. http://sigma.imag.fr/labbe/main.php.

  9. February and March 2012.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Tom Merriam, Jacques Savoy, Edward Arnold for their careful readings of previous versions of this paper, the anonymous reviewers and members of the LIG laboratory for their valuable comments.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire d’Informatique de Grenoble, Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France

    Cyril Labbé

  2. PACTE, Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Grenoble, Grenoble, France

    Dominique Labbé

Authors
  1. Cyril Labbé
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  2. Dominique Labbé
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Cyril Labbé.

Appendices

Appendix 1: Examples of SCIgen papers

Figure 5 is an example of a SCIgen-Physics paper. Formula generation have been improved compare to the one used by SCIgen-Origin (cf. Fig. 6).

Fig. 5
figure 5

Generated text, graph and formula: SCIgen Physics

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Fig. 6
figure 6

Generated text: SCIgen Computer Science

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Appendix 2: Comparison between inter-textual distance and other similarity index

Figures 7, 8 and 9 show the dendrograms obtained using cosine, Jaccard and Euclidean metrics. They are computed using the R text mining package (Meyer et al. 2008). These dendrograms are to be compared to the one in Fig. 4. Dendrograms for Cosine and Euclidean do not group together the Ike Antkare corpus.

Fig. 7
figure 7

Cosine: dendrogram for analysis of corpora Antkare (black), Z (blue), MLT (red) (color figure online)

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Fig. 8
figure 8

Euclidean: dendrogram for analysis of corpora Antkare (black), Z (blue), MLT (red) (color figure online)

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Fig. 9
figure 9

Jaccard: Dendrogram for analysis of corpora Antkare (black), Z (blue), MLT (red) (color figure online)

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Results, for the classification by assigning a text of the MLT corpus to the class of its nearest neighbor, are given in Table 4. The arXiv data set was not tested because of its size which make the use of the R text mining package problematic.

Table 4 Classification of the MLT Corpus (122 papers) using Inter-textual distance, Cosine, Euclidean and Jaccard metrics
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Labbé, C., Labbé, D. Duplicate and fake publications in the scientific literature: how many SCIgen papers in computer science?. Scientometrics 94, 379–396 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-012-0781-y

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