Sneaked references

Published

September 7, 2026

Modified

September 8, 2026

Introduction

TipDefinition

A form of citation manipulation in which additional, irrelevant references that do not appear in the PDF/HTML version of record are sneaked into the metadata during the DOI registration process, while leaving the version of record unaltered and the additional citations invisible to readers (Besançon et al. 2024, paraphrased).

Inconsistent reference metadata for the same article in Crossref vs. Dimensions. Reproduced from Besançon et al. (2024) under CC BY 4.0 license.

Inconsistent reference metadata for the same article in Crossref vs. Dimensions. Reproduced from Besançon et al. (2024) under CC BY 4.0 license.

Key resources

Note“Sneaked references”

Explanation of the problem by Besançon et al. (2024).

Bibliography

Besançon, Lonni, Guillaume Cabanac, Cyril Labbé, and Alexander Magazinov. 2024. “Sneaked References: Fabricated Reference Metadata Distort Citation Counts.” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 75 (12): 1368–79. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24896.

Reuse

Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as:
Forensic Scientometrics. 2026. “Sneaked References.” September 7. https://fo-sci.org/issues/sneaked-references/.