Trends in Gaming Indicators: On Failed Attempts at Deception and their Computerised Detection

Counting articles and citations, analyzing citations and coauthors graphs have become ways to assess researchers and institutions performance. Fairly enough, these measures are becoming targets for institutions and individual researchers thus triggering new behaviors. As a matter of fact, scientometrics and informetrics systems of all kinds have to separate the grain from the chaff. Among others, fields like information retrieval, network analysis and natural language processing may offer answers to deal with this kind of problems. Through several emblematic case studies (fake researcher, generated papers, paper mills), we show evidences of attempts to game indicators together with automatic ways to detect them (automatic detection of generated papers, errors detection).