A recent study has exposed a method of artificially inflating citation counts through "sneaked references," which are extra citations included in metadata but not in the actual text of articles. This manipulation, uncovered in journals by Technoscience Academy, distorts citation metrics that are critical for research funding and academic promotions. The Conversation reports:

The investigation began when Guillaume Cabanac, a professor at the University of Toulouse, wrote a post on PubPeer, a website dedicated to post-publication peer review, in which scientists discuss and analyze publications. In the post, he detailed how he had noticed an inconsistency: a Hindawi journal article that he suspected was fraudulent because it contained awkward phrases had far more citations than downloads, which is very unusual. The post caught the attention of several sleuths who are now the authors of the JASIST article. We used a scientific search engine to look for articles citing the initial article. Google Scholar found none, but Crossref and Dimensions did find references. The difference? Google Scholar is likely to mostly rely on the article's main text to extract the references appearing in the bibliography section, whereas Crossref and Dimensions use metadata provided by publishers.

To understand the extent of the manipulation, we examined three scientific journals that were published by the Technoscience Academy, the publisher responsible for the articles that contained questionable citations. [...] In the journals published by Technoscience Academy, at least 9% of recorded references were "sneaked references." These additional references were only in the metadata, distorting citation counts and giving certain authors an unfair advantage. Some legitimate references were also lost, meaning they were not present in the metadata. In addition, when analyzing the sneaked references, we found that they highly benefited some researchers. For example, a single researcher who was associated with Technoscience Academy benefited from more than 3,000 additional illegitimate citations. Some journals from the same publisher benefited from a couple hundred additional sneaked citations.

We wanted our results to be externally validated, so we posted our study as a preprint, informed both Crossref and Dimensions of our findings and gave them a link to the preprinted investigation. Dimensions acknowledged the illegitimate citations and confirmed that their database reflects Crossref's data. Crossref also confirmed the extra references in Retraction Watch and highlighted that this was the first time that it had been notified of such a problem in its database. The publisher, based on Crossref's investigation, has taken action to fix the problem.

To combat this practice of "sneaked references," the authors suggest several measures: rigorous verification of metadata by publishers and agencies like Crossref, independent audits to ensure data reliability, and increased transparency in managing references and citations.

For real though, I get goosebumps every time they come up with some novel use for the navigational deflector and save the day.

OC in that I made it just now, but it's very likely not the first time this comparison has been made.

They only seem to travel solo, and as soon as you smack one, another one immediately takes its place.

After teasing support for the fediverse earlier this year, the newsletter platform and Substack rival Ghost has finally delivered. "Over the past few days, Ghost says it has achieved two major milestones in its move to become a federated service," reports TechCrunch. "Of note, it has federated its own newsletter, making it the first federated Ghost instance on the internet."

From the report:

Users can follow the newsletter through their preferred federated app at @[email protected], though the company warns there will be bugs and issues as it continues to work on the platform's integration with ActivityPub, the protocol that powers Mastodon and other federated apps. "Having multiple Ghost instances in production successfully running ActivityPub is a huge milestone for us because it means that for the first time, we're interacting with the wider fediverse. Not just theoretical local implementations and tests, but the real world wide social web," the company shared in its announcement of the news.

In addition, Ghost's ActivityPub GitHub repository is now fully open source. That means those interested in tracking Ghost's progress toward federation can follow its code changes in real time, and anyone else can learn from, modify, distribute or contribute to its work. Developers who want to collaborate with Ghost are also being invited to get involved following this move. By offering a federated version of the newsletter, readers will have more choices on how they want to subscribe. That is, instead of only being able to follow the newsletter via email or the web, they also can track it using RSS or ActivityPub-powered apps, like Mastodon and others. Ghost said it will also develop a way for sites with paid subscribers to manage access via ActivityPub, but that functionality hasn't yet rolled out with this initial test.

They used to put the affected versions in the email, but that stopped a few months ago. Now it's just a vague "product is affected, click the link to learn more". Every. Time. the support part of their site gets hugged to death as if the uptick in traffic to it is completely unexpected.

So now I have Schrodinger's vulnerability until whatever potato-class servers they have their support bulletins running on frees up enough slots to render a frigging static HTML page.

It's almost as bad as news teasers that are like "Is something in your house going to kill you in the next 30 seconds? Find out more at 11!"

cross-posted from: https://dubvee.org/post/1463905

1.4.1 is mostly a bugfix / under-the-hood release, though there are some new things as well as several refinements to old things (see Misc Changes below).

This is the first of a few releases that's going to focus on addressing some feedback I've gotten that basically boils down to "too many buttons". I agree with that completely, and this release eliminates at least one of them.

Say Goodbye to 'Community Menu' and Hello to Community Modals

The "Community" menu button on posts has been completely removed, and all of its features (and more) have been moved to the newly created Community profile modal. When you click on the community name in the post header, instead of being taken to the /c/ community page, it brings up a modal with the community icon, banner, description, moderators, and a list of action buttons. It does for community links what the user profile modal did for user links in the last release.

Another benefit to this is allowing access to the community details / sidebar info while on mobile. It used to have that ability, but it was ugly and kludged on, so I removed it several versions ago. Now it's available again, and implemented in a way I like.

Post Flairs

There's a new user option, enabled by default, that will extract any [tag] items from post titles and convert them into flair badges. Anything in [] in the post title will be converted into a flair tag, and the [whatever] removed from the displayed title.

Clicking a flair badge will perform a prepared search for other posts with the same flair (e.g. search?type=Posts&q=[tag]). They work more or less the same as hashtags do (if you have those enabled).

This had been half-implemented in a branch for some time now, but I wasn't sure if other front-ends were handling them in a similar way. Saw an post from the Photon dev saying they're adding them, and it's compatible with my implementation, so figured it was time to dust off that branch and merge it in.

It also supports nested flairs: if there are multiple, comma-delimited words in the brackets, each one will be applied as a flair.

Debug view showing original post title for the above:

1.4.1 Changelog

Get Tesseract

• Hosted Instance: Unlocked to allow login to any Lemmy instance
• Github
• Changelog
• Docs
• Matrix Support
• Lemmy Community
• Docker: ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:v1.4.1 (Should have images for amd64 and arm64 now that the Github actions are fixed)
  • If the Github actions fail to build, you can use the alternate tag ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:1.4.1 which is the one I push manually for QA on the hosted instance. Note that it's only amd64, though.

3x04: Who Watches the Watchers.

Pamela Segall (Adlon)

(Is OC in that I made it after thinking of it, but it's not super creative and was likely done before)

1.4.1 is mostly a bugfix / under-the-hood release, though there are some new things as well as several refinements to old things (see Misc Changes below).

This is the first of a few releases that's going to focus on addressing some feedback I've gotten that basically boils down to "too many buttons". I agree with that completely, and this release eliminates at least one of them.

Say Goodbye to 'Community Menu' and Hello to Community Modals

The "Community" menu button on posts has been completely removed, and all of its features (and more) have been moved to the newly created Community profile modal. When you click on the community name in the post header, instead of being taken to the /c/ community page, it brings up a modal with the community icon, banner, description, moderators, and a list of action buttons. It does for community links what the user profile modal did for user links in the last release.

Another benefit to this is allowing access to the community details / sidebar info while on mobile. It used to have that ability, but it was ugly and kludged on, so I removed it several versions ago. Now it's available again, and implemented in a way I like.

Post Flairs

There's a new user option, enabled by default, that will extract any [tag] items from post titles and convert them into flair badges. Anything in [] in the post title will be converted into a flair tag, and the [whatever] removed from the displayed title.

Clicking a flair badge will perform a prepared search for other posts with the same flair (e.g. search?type=Posts&q=[tag]). They work more or less the same as hashtags do (if you have those enabled).

This had been half-implemented in a branch for some time now, but I wasn't sure if other front-ends were handling them in a similar way. Saw an post from the Photon dev saying they're adding them, and it's compatible with my implementation, so figured it was time to dust off that branch and merge it in.

It also supports nested flairs: if there are multiple, comma-delimited words in the brackets, each one will be applied as a flair.

Debug view showing original post title for the above:

1.4.1 Changelog

Get Tesseract

• Hosted Instance: Unlocked to allow login to any Lemmy instance
• Github
• Changelog
• Docs
• Matrix Support
• Lemmy Community
• Docker: ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:v1.4.1 (Should have images for amd64 and arm64 now that the Github actions are fixed)

2x19 Manhunt

In every other way, though, it's probably best to keep me away from command.

Environmental Systems Officer: Inertial dampeners are down, sir.

Me: Uh.....full stop!

Conn: Sir?

Me (trying to sound confident): You heard me.