"This digital-hygiene routine will protect your scholarship"
Guillaume Cabanac writes in a Nature World View article on performing “scholarly check-ups” and why you need them:
Scholars’ names, work or both are used by crooked individuals or institutions to deceive others. The scope of the problem dismays me. I shiver when imagining my university’s research-integrity officer coming to me with a pile of buggy papers — that I’ve never seen before — bearing my name.
I’ve had articles come out that misquoted or misrepresented one of my papers, but generally in minor ways. Nothing like someone putting my name on their article. (Guess I’m not famous enough!)
The article has good advice but doesn’t give a magic bullet, as they note. I wonder if automation can help with this problem (they mention signing up for author alerts), at least if you have a unique or fairly distinct name. But could automation end up making it worse?
Jim Bagrow
Associate Professor of Mathematics & Statistics
My research interests include complex networks, computational social science, and data science.