The Dissemination of Fake Science : On the Ranking of Retracted Articles in Google

In Sven Bernecker, Amy K. Flowerree & Thomas Grundmann (eds.), The Epistemology of Fake News. New York, NY: Oxford University Press (2021)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Fake news can originate from an ordinary person carelessly posting what turns out to be false information orfrom the intentional actions of fake news factory workers,but broadly speaking it can also originate from scientific fraud. In the latter case, the article can be retracted upon discovery of the fraud. A case study shows, however, that such fake sciencecan be visible in Google even after the article was retracted, in fact more visible thanthe retraction notice. We hypothesize that the reason for this lies in the popularity-based logic governing Google, in particular its foundational PageRank algorithm,in conjunction with a psychological law which we refer to as the “law of retraction”: a retraction notice is typically taken to be less interestingand therefore less popular with internet users than the original content retracted. We conduct anempiricalstudy drawing on records of articles retracted due to fraud in the Retraction Watch public database. The study tests the extent to which such retracted scientific articles are still highly ranked in Google –and more so than information about the retraction. We find, among other things, thatboth Google Search and Google Scholar more often than not rankeda link to the original article higher than a link indicating that the article has been retracted.Surprisingly, Google Scholar did not perform better in this regard than Google Search.We also foundcases in which Google didnot track the retraction of anarticle on the first result page at all.We conclude thatboth Google Search and Google Scholar runthe risk of disseminating fake science through theirranking algorithms.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Retractions in Science.K. Brad Wray & Line Edslev Andersen - 2018 - Scientometrics 117 (3):2009-2019.
What is fake news?M. R. X. Dentith - 2018 - University of Bucharest Review (2):24-34.
What is fake news?Romy Jaster & David Lanius - 2018 - Versus 2 (127):207-227.
Fake Journals: Not Always Valid Ways to Distinguish Them.Khaled Moustafa - 2015 - Science and Engineering Ethics 21 (5):1391-1392.
Suggestions to Enhance the Scholarly Search Engine: Google Scholar.Ibrahim M. Nasser, Mohammed M. Elsobeihi & Samy S. Abu Naser - 2019 - International Journal of Engineering and Information Systems (IJEAIS) 3 (3):11-16.
Aesthetics of Fake. An Overview.Andrea Mecacci - 2016 - Aisthesis: Pratiche, Linguaggi E Saperi Dell’Estetico 9 (2):59-69.
Detecting Errors that Result in Retractions.Line Edslev Andersen & K. Brad Wray - 2019 - Social Studies of Science 46 (6):942-954.
Fake Identities in Social Network Research: To Be Disclosed?Shunhai Qu & Viroj Wiwanitkit - 2014 - Science and Engineering Ethics 20 (4):1151-1151.

Analytics

Added to PP
2020-04-02

Downloads
39 (#356,630)

6 months
3 (#445,838)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author Profiles

Erik J. Olsson
Lund University
Emmanuel Genot
Lund University

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Do we Trust Blindly on the Web?Emmanuel Genot & Erik J. Olsson - 2017 - Societé Editrice Il Mulino 1:87-106.

Add more references