“Sneaked references: Fabricated reference metadata distort citation counts” Chosen for 2025 Best JASIST Paper Award

 

 

The Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) is delighted to announce that “Sneaked references: Fabricated reference metadata distort citation counts,” written by Lonni Besançon, Guillaume Cabanac, Cyril Labbé, and Alexander Magazinov, published in Volume 75, Issue12 of the Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology (JASIST), is the recipient of the Best JASIST Paper Award for 2025.

This award recognizes the best refereed paper published in the JASIST volume year preceding the ASIS&T annual meeting. JASIST is published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. The winning paper is selected for its contribution, professional merit, and presentation quality.

In the paper, the authors “report evidence of an undocumented method to manipulate citation counts involving “sneaked” references. Sneaked references are registered as metadata for published scientific articles in which they do not appear. This manipulation exploits trusted relationships between various actors: publishers, the Crossref metadata registration agency, digital libraries, and bibliometric platforms. By collecting metadata from various sources, we show that extra undue references are actually sneaked in at Digital Object Identifier (DOI) registration time, resulting in artificially inflated citation counts.” The authors call for further investigation and reform: “The extent of the distortion—due to sneaked and lost references—in the global literature remains unknown and requires further investigations. Bibliometric platforms producing citation counts should identify, quantify, and correct these flaws to provide accurate data to their patrons and prevent further citation gaming.”

Award jurors note that the paper is “A fascinating story ... reads like a police procedural.... A paper you can assign at a reading to provoke discussion about nefarious goings on in academic citations.”

 

In this paper, the authors report on a previously undocumented “loophole” for manipulating citation counts. Their analysis focuses on a publisher that “sneaks references” by exploiting the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) registration process, so that references not cited within a published paper are registered as part of its metadata, thereby being counted as citations. This practice distorts citation counts, even as the original paper remains unaltered. The authors also discuss implications, countermeasures, and corrective actions.

Award jurors noted the paper’s timeliness, given the growing issue of citation gaming. They commended the authors’ use of “subtle methods” to validate the existence of sneaked references. The result is “a fascinating story and a great read” that “reads like a police procedural.” This is a paper “you can assign as a reading to provoke discussion about nefarious goings on in academic citations.”

Upon learning of the award for their paper, the authors said, “We are truly honored to receive this prestigious award. We thank the JASIST Best Paper Award Jury and the ASIS&T Board of Directors for their selection in our favor. Our paper revealed a fragility of the current scholarly infrastructure that allowed citation metadata to be manipulated. We are pleased to see that there is not only space for research manuscripts on questionable practices but that they can even have enough impact to be worthy of a Best Paper Award. With this paper, we have given further evidence that research assessment should not rely on metrics alone and that further efforts should be made by institutions, funders, and committees to recognize this problem and encourage efforts to correct the scientific literature and its metadata.”

ASIS&T also commends the finalists shortlisted by the jury for this year’s award:

• “He looks very real”: Media, knowledge, and search‐based strategies for deepfake identification by Dion Hoe-Lian Goh
• An empirical exploration of the subjectivity problem of information qualities by Frans Van der Sluis, Julien Faure, and Sofie Phutachard Homnual
• Virtuous search: A framework for intellectual virtue in online search by Tim Gorichanaz

The authors will receive the award during the 2025 meeting of ASIS&T, which will be held 14-18 November 2025 in Crystal City, VA.