Cheating with publication metrics on SSRN

With the advent of online bibliographic databases like RePEc and SSRN, with the increasing importance of readership statistics in the evaluation of a researcher, and with said evaluation becoming more and more competitive, it is obvious that some researchers will try to find ways to manipulate these statistics. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that such manipulations are taking place successfully at SSRN, with self downloads and in particular teachers telling their classes to download their works. Some even use social forums like Fark or Facebook to ask total strangers to increase their counts. And it is common place to send emails to friends and family encouraging downloads. But that is only anecdotal evidence. Benjamin Edelman and Ian Larkin now provide better evidence that this is taking place. Their paper is on SSRN, so go and increase their download count...

Their strategy is to identify when in the career of a researcher increased downloads would matter and test whether they indeed increase at that time. Where most of the cheating is going on is with SSRN's "top ten" lists. There are many of those, and thus it is relatively easy to get on them, with a little help, especially when one is already close to the 10th position. Edelman and Larkin also find that one or two years before a career move, downloads "mysteriously" tend to increase. However, they find no evidence for approaching tenure decisions. But I think this underestimates the problem, as this study identifies fraud from the historical SSRN logs and how SSRN subsequently identified suspicious downloads according to its new rules. Those rules are very imperfect and thus obviously do not detect successful manipulation which anecdotal evidence shows is happening.

Fortunately in Economics, people do not rely on SSRN statistics, maybe because of this perception that they can be fraudulent (but SSRN claims to have cleaned up their act). RePEc statistics are followed much more closely, none the least because it is perceived as the "good guy" (whereas SSRN is profit seeking), because it has been open about its statistics from the start, because many safeguards have been put in place to prevent fraud from being successful, as explained on the RePEc blog post, and because downloads are not the only relevant metric. And in particular, RePEc does not insist on every page about its download statistics. And the fact that SSRN statistics are updated in real time is just too tempting (refresh a SSRN page to see what I mean).