The recent article by Jacso titled "Google Scholar duped and deduped- the aura of "robometrics" published in Online Information Review, Vol 35 No. 1 presented an interesting insight as to why H-index, in particular the one computed by Google Scholar, is not a reliable tool. Google Scholar and tool such as those by Anne-Wil Harzing's Publish or Perish are used by some academics and universities as a tool for calculating their research impact. However, Jasco showed an interesting case whereby a researcher created a fake author – Antkare I., and generated 100 "fake" papers using SciGen (a software that generates fake computer science manuscripts using all the IT technical jargons to make the paper look as if they are genuine, the interesting thing is that some of these papers were actually accepted by conference!). Anyway, these fake papers in turn cited each other's paper. I guess you know the outcome, within few months, once these papers and citations were captured by Google scholar, and Harzing's Publish or Perish which is based on Google Scholar, the fake authors Antkare received a total citations of 9626, thus giving him the computer scientist with the 2nd highest number of citations! So for those universities that based their promotions on google scholar, think twice.
