H-Index Manipulation by Merging Articles: Models, Theory, and Experiments

van Bevern, René; Komusiewicz, Christian; Niedermeier, Rolf; Sorge, Manuel; Walsh, Toby

H-Index Manipulation by Merging Articles: Models, Theory, and Experiments

René van Bevern, Christian Komusiewicz, Rolf Niedermeier, Manuel Sorge, Toby Walsh

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Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Main Track. Pages 808-813.

Abstract

An author's profile on Google Scholar consists of indexed articles and associated data, such as the number of citations and the H-index. The author is allowed to merge articles, which may affect the H-index. We analyze the parameterized complexity of maximizing the H-index using article merges. Herein, to model realistic manipulation scenarios, we define a compatability graph whose edges correspond to plausible merges. Moreover, we consider multiple possible measures for computing the citation count of a merged article. For the measure used by Google Scholar, we give an algorithm that maximizes the H-index in linear time if the compatibility graph has constant-size connected components. In contrast, if we allow to merge arbitrary articles, then already increasing the H-index by one is NP-hard. Experiments on Google Scholar profiles of AI researchers show that the H-index can be manipulated substantially only by merging articles with highly dissimilar titles, which would be easy to discover.

René van Bevern, Christian Komusiewicz, Rolf Niedermeier, Manuel Sorge, and Toby Walsh. 2015. H-Index Manipulation by Merging Articles: Models, Theory, and Experiments. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-15. IJCAI, 808–813. https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2015/119

@inproceedings{ijcai2015p119,
  title     = {H-Index Manipulation by Merging Articles: Models, Theory, and Experiments},
  author    = {van Bevern, René and Komusiewicz, Christian and Niedermeier, Rolf and Sorge, Manuel and Walsh, Toby},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Joint Conference on
               Artificial Intelligence, {IJCAI-15}},
  publisher = {International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence},
  editor    = {Qiang Yang and Michael Wooldridge},
  pages     = {808--813},
  year      = {2015},
  month     = {7},
  note      = {Main Track},
  url       = {https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2015/119},
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - H-Index Manipulation by Merging Articles: Models, Theory, and Experiments
AU  - van Bevern, René
AU  - Komusiewicz, Christian
AU  - Niedermeier, Rolf
AU  - Sorge, Manuel
AU  - Walsh, Toby
T2  - Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-15
PB  - International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence
PY  - 2015
SP  - 808
EP  - 813
UR  - https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2015/119
ER  -