Friday 11 March 2011

You Can't Trust Everything You Read on the Web

Houston, we have a problem. It turns out that trusting repositories as authoritative sources of research information is all very well and good, except when the repository is an authoritative source of demonstration (fake) documents. Sebastien Francois (one of the EPrints team at Southampton) has just reported that Google Scholar is indexing the fake documents that we make available in demoprints.eprints.org.

So when your weaker students start citing
Freiwald, W. and Bonardi, X. and Leir, X. (1998) Hellbenders in the Wild. Better Farming, 1 (4). pp. 91-134.
you know that it's just a teensy misunderstanding, OK? But if anyone needs their citation count artificially boosting, I have a repository available to monetize.

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