Google scholar error 403

fake application

A while ago, I was part of a hiring committee for a university abroad and among the applications we found one that was so blatantly fake as to wonder what was the purpose of the person (persons?) behind it. From a massive vita including all rewards in the field, incl. a COPSS presidential award, to publications in all top journals and conferences, with the applicant name added to the list of real authors, to fake affiliations, to a completely fake Google Scholar page, &tc. I was surprised at the possibility to include papers on one’s Scholar profile without appearing among the authors but this is apparently possible. And I wonder at the attempt itself since the application is screaming “fake”! A very weird form of performance art?! After searching a wee bit more, I found that some of my French colleagues had opened a webpage to warn about the activities of this individual (?). Including plagiarised papers or books still for sale on Amazon.

Microsoft wrote me an email

I received the following and unsolicited email today from Microsoft Research:

Dear Christian,
Microsoft Research would like to tell you about Microsoft Academic Search (MAS) a search engine to explore publications, authors, conferences, journals and their relationships. Based on our data mining algorithm and data on the web, MAS has aggregated some of your information here.
This is our initial coverage into such academic area, we understand that our coverage is very limited, therefore the aggregated information might not be 100% correct or complete. We are working on finding and processing more data, better name disambiguation, and other enhancements. While you’re here, please check out interactive features like relationship path, and public APIs if you’re interested in using our data set in your research work.
We would love to hear your thoughts about how MAS can help your research and work. It would be great if you can take some time to fill out this short anonymous survey.
Best regards,
Microsoft Academic Search Team

which I find rather astounding. In the sense that the MAS team is basically asking me to correct the inaccuracies in a bibliometric tool I am not interested in! (The link to the survey was not working, not that I was particularly excited in answering! And there is no direct way to correct the information contained in the file, as opposed to google scholar citations…)

Automated promotion

Olivier Cappé pointed out to me this reference where Cyril Labbé explains how to achieve a high ranking on Google Scholar with (fake) automatically generated papers… Of course, the ranking does not stand any close examination but nonetheless…