Berlin, April 1st 2011: The Federal Intelligence Service found out a Ponzi scheme of educational citations business lead by an unemployed particle physicist. A house search conducted in Berlin the other day revealed material documenting the planning and administration of the profitable business of trading citations for travel reimbursement. According to the Federal Intelligence Service, the hint originated from analysts at Michigan University, Ann Arbor, who was analyzing the structure of citation networks in the academic community.
In past due 2010, their evaluation pointed towards an exponentially growing cluster originating from a previously unconnected researcher located in Germany’s capital. A known member of the Ann Arbor group, who wants to remain unnamed, inquired about the biography of the young genius, called Al Bert, sparking such amount of activity. The researcher was easily in a position to find Dr. Bert scheduled for a unique number of seminars in locations all around the globe, sometimes more than 4 weekly. It turned out Dr. Bert is not just a fictitious person. Dr. Bert graduated in 2006, but his agreement at the school run in 2008 out. Following this, colleagues lost sight of Dr. Bert.
He applied for unemployment benefits in October 2008. As the Federal Intelligence Service reported this Wednesday, he later founded an agency called ‘High Impact’ (the web site has since been taken down) that wanted to boost a paper’s citation-count number. A user signed up with the finished, but not yet published, paper and decided to pay EUR 10 to Dr. Bert’s company for each citation his paper received above the author’s average citation count number during registration. The user decided to cite 5 documents the company would name also. A registered user would earn EUR 10 for each recruitment of fresh paper, their own possibly.
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This quickly created an ever-growing network of analysts citing each other’s papers and prompted the authors to create new papers, certain they would become well cited. Within only a few weeks, the network had spread from physics to other research fields. With each citation, Dr. Bert made an income. The algorithm he used to assign citations made certain his own works became top cites also.
Yet, numerous researchers instantly having documents with several hundred citations above their previously average citation count number, their fee proceeded to go into some thousand dollars. On several instances Dr. Bert would suggest they invite him for a workshop at their institution and find it in a non-existent room. He would receive reimbursement for a fraudulent self-printed boarding pass then, illegible due for an alleged malfunctioning printer. Names of research workers subscribed to Dr. Bert’s company were not accessible during writing.
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