Detection of metadata manipulations: Finding sneaked references in the scholarly literature

Abstract:  We report evidence of a new set of sneaked references discovered in the scientific literature. Sneaked references are references registered in the metadata of publications without being listed in reference section or in the full text of the actual publications where they ought to be found. We document here 80,205 references sneaked in metadata of the International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology (IJISRT). These sneaked references are registered with Crossref and all cite -- thus benefit -- this same journal. Using this dataset, we evaluate three different methods to automatically identify sneaked references. These methods compare reference lists registered with Crossref against the full text or the reference lists extracted from PDF files. In addition, we report attempts to scale the search for sneaked references to the scholarly literature.