The AI expert who cited himself thousands of times on scientific paper | Hacker News Reader

The AI expert who cited himself thousands of times on scientific paper

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108 pointsbelter22 comments

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Which is why you should ask people to exclude self citations when reporting h-index. First of all Google scholar should fix this.

Relying just on h-index is bad in the first places. I habe colleagues in experimental physics who are on papers with tens of coauthors, working only on a small bit that enabled multiple experiments and have an amazing hindex. you cannot compare that to a theoretically working niche field. In the end it is about wrong incentives in science. See also this article on rising self citations [0] . Having said that h-index is a good KPI to track for myself.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00090-z

I know lots of people who are authors on papers they've never even looked at. (They implicitly agreed to be authors and know that there's some such papers, they just didn't even read the tiles)

you could get a friend/family member to do the same thing though (they cite each other thousands of times)

Yes, but the bar is higher. No safe is impenetrable, or alarm system foolproof, but they do make undesirable actions more difficult.

Or if you got good charisma you can do it with most others.

Citation rings are a major issue, particularly in AI conferences.

Just out of curiosity, do AI practitioners utilize AI to optimize citations? If so, I'd expect papers detailing how to go about it to get massive citations. The appropriate venue might be the Journal of Data Science, Informetrics, and Citation Studies [0], and I didn't see any such articles there yet.

[0] https://jcitation.org/index.php/jdscics

But also particularly in a lot of fields.

One problem in niche areas is that sometimes there are only so many people working on a particular problem and only so many different papers/authors to cite.

I'm not talking about niche areas. I'm talking about genuine illicit citation rings.

This guy, David Sinclair at Harvard, Marc T-L at Stanford ... disappointing but not entirely surprising that even in academia the spoils go to the scammers.

What’s up with Sinclair? Saw his name pop up in a multitude of aging/longevity content on youtube and my spidey senses were tingling.

I couldn't finish Sinclair's book on aging [1]; even in a book that he co-authored he comes across as a scammer

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifespan:_Why_We_Age_%E2%80%93...

I have been seeing this guy David Sinclair a lot in my Youtube feed lately with raving reviews. But after reading your comment did a bit of research and my god what a scam(1).

There is so much misinformation and gaming going on in every industry and with A.I. generated content it's going to get so much easier.

(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn0EJQPyxkA

For every person like you who is on HN and willing to do followup research and change their mind, there are at least a hundred who will accept the first thing they're told at face value.

I mean, how could a Harvard Professor be a scammer ... right?!

The link to his Google Scholar page from search results 404’s for me at the moment, however a recent copy is available here

https://web.archive.org/web/20230505164450/https://scholar.g...

Thousands of times? Seems like the kind of thing a machine would do...

(￢_￢)

It can't be true!

Why not? One sentinel for every man, woman, and child in Zion. That sounds exactly like the thinking of a machine to me.

"Only one person has presented his candidacy for rector of one of the oldest academic institutions in the world, the University of Salamanca. "

There's a lot of focus on the scumminess of that one person, but there is no mention of why only one villain has thrown his hat into that ring.

It is one of the oldest universities in this world, and it deserves better...

Perhaps it's different in USA due to different salary policies, but in European academia it sometimes happens that some of the leading positions are not actually that desirable, as you'll just sacrifice your scientific work (which you presumably love) to get bogged down with administrative duties instead. Like, our leadership roles are generally elected, so we can pick any one of us if we're unhappy with what the administration does, but I have seen this resulting even in literally drawing straws to choose who will apply to be the only candidate to be the head of an (sub)organization, because it's clear to everybody that we have to choose somebody to do it, but no one wants to be that one despite it technically being a promotion with slightly higher compensation. Perhaps rector is the role where this isn't relevant, since there you have multiple candidates who have already "sacrificed their life" to administration, but it can be the case for others.

The article describes a rushed election, preventing due time for fair campaigning

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