Ike Antkare, His Publications, and Those of His Disciples

When evaluating a scientific paper, footnotes and citations have become crucial tools to quantify academic excellence. This has become an important trend, for several reasons. Metrics have gained worldwide importance with the development of international university rankings often reported in the media. But metrics also have national impact when they are used for the allocation of research funding. Finally, they have direct consequences at the local and personal level when used for academic promotions or bonuses. How can we quantify academic excellence in a way that is fair, that is, without being influenced by prejudice, professional networks, connections to former students and mentors, and so on? Can that be done by measuring the number of scientific papers and the citations they receive? What can be inferred from this kind of measurement? Is it easy to falsify these metrics to game the system? The answer is yes. It is possible to game metrics and, yes, it has been done. It is probably being done as we speak. This can be clearly demonstrated by the Ike Antkare case, his publications, and those of his disciples. Meaningless scientific papers can be randomly generated. Such generators exist for different fields: computer science, mathematics, or philosophy. Meaningless computergenerated scientific texts can be used in several ways. For example, they have allowed Ike Antkare to become one of the most highly cited scientists in the world. For many years, disciples of Ike Antkare authorized such papers in real scientific conferences published by some wellknown publishers like IEEE and Springer. As a result, such publications appear in all kinds of bibliographic services (Scopus, ISIWeb of Knowledge, Google Scholar ...). These generated texts are easy to spot by using intertextual distance combined with automatic clustering. Such 14 Ike Antkare, His Publications, and Those of His Disciples