There will be no Readers’ wildlife feature today as we have only one in the queue, and I will save it for Ceiling Cat’s day. But Caturday felids we do have, and in plenty. Here are three and two—count them, two—items of lagniappe.
First, we have the world’s most cited cat, at least scientifically. But how does a cat get authorship on a published paper? Click below to read the article from Science by Christie Wilcox. The cat is named Larry, but it’s not the Larry we know as the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office. The science Larry shows that you can actually buy your way to scientific “fame,” judged in terms of citations.
An excerpt:
Larry Richardson appeared to be an early-career mathematician with potential. According to Google Scholar, he’d authored a dozen papers on topics ranging from complex algebras to the structure of mathematical objects, racking up more than 130 citations in 4 years. It would all be rather remarkable—if the studies weren’t complete gibberish. And Larry wasn’t a cat.
“It was an exercise in absurdity,” says Reese Richardson, a graduate student in metascience and computational biology at Northwestern University. Earlier this month, he and fellow research misconduct sleuth Nick Wise at the University of Cambridge cooked up Larry’s profile and engineered the feline’s scientific ascent. Their goal: to make him the world’s most highly cited cat by mimicking a tactic apparently employed by a citation-boosting service advertised on Facebook. In just 2 short weeks, the duo accomplished its mission.
The stunt will hopefully draw awareness to the growing issue of the manipulation of research metrics, says Peter Lange, a higher education consultant and emeritus professor of political science at Duke University. “I think most faculty members at the institutions I know are not even aware of such citation mills.”
As a general rule, the more a scientific paper is cited by other studies, the more important it and its authors are in a field. One shorthand is the popular “h-index”: An h-index of 10 means a person has 10 papers with at least 10 citations each, for instance.
nflating a researcher’s citation count and h-index gives them “a tremendous advantage” in hiring and tenure decisions says Jennifer Byrne, a cancer researcher at the University of Sydney. It also drives the business model of shady organizations that promise to boost your citations in exchange for cash. “If you can just buy citations,” Byrne says, “you’re buying influence.”
Enter Larry the cat. His tale began a few weeks ago, when Wise saw a Facebook ad offering “citation & h-index boosting.” It wasn’t the first promo he and Richardson had seen for such services. (The going rate seems to be about $10 per citation.) But this one linked to screenshots of Google Scholar profiles of real scientists. That meant the duo could see just which citations were driving up the numbers.
The citations, it turned out, often belonged to papers full of nonsense text authored by long-dead mathematicians such as Pythagoras. The studies had been uploaded as PDFs to the academic social platform ResearchGate and then subsequently deleted, obscuring their nature. (Wise and Richardson had to dig into Google’s cache to read the documents.) “We were like, ‘Wow, this procedure is incredibly easy,’” Richardson recalls. “All you have to do is put some fake papers on ResearchGate.”
It’s so easy, Wise noted at the time, that a quickly written script to pump out plausible-sounding papers could make anyone highly cited—even a cat. “I don’t know if he was being serious,” Richardson says. “But I certainly took that as a challenge.” And he knew just the cat to beat: F.D.C. Willard. In 1975, theoretical physicist Jack Hetherington added his Siamese to one of his single-author papers so the references to “we” would make more sense. As of this year, “Felis Domesticus Chester Willard” has 107 citations.
Here’s how you do it. Once you put fake papers on ResearchGate, Google will do the rest:
It’s so easy, Wise noted at the time, that a quickly written script to pump out plausible-sounding papers could make anyone highly cited—even a cat. “I don’t know if he was being serious,” Richardson says. “But I certainly took that as a challenge.” And he knew just the cat to beat: F.D.C. Willard. In 1975, theoretical physicist Jack Hetherington added his Siamese to one of his single-author papers so the references to “we” would make more sense. As of this year, “Felis Domesticus Chester Willard” has 107 citations.
To break that record, Richardson turned to his grandmother’s cat Larry. In about an hour he created 12 fake papers authored by Larry and 12 others that cited each of Larry’s works. That would amount to 12 papers with 12 citations each, for a total citation count of 144 and an h-index of 12. Richardson uploaded the manuscripts to a ResearchGate profile he created for the feline. Then, he and Wise waited for Google Scholar to automatically scrape the fake data.
But Larry was caught!
Google Scholar removed Larry’s citations about 1 week after they appeared, so he has lost his unofficial title. However, his profile still exists, and the dubious citations in the profiles that were in the advertisement remain. So, “They haven’t fixed the problem,” Wise says. Google Scholar did not respond to requests for comment.
The problem is that humans can also do this, inflating their “h-index” if they want to commit this scam.
Here’s Sabine Hossenfelder explaining the “scam,” which she sees as a portent of the end of academia. The cat is a joke, but she’s right that scientists pay too much attention to the “h-index” and not enough to the papers themselves, and in the case the papers are fake. It should be caught when a researcher is being considered for a promotion, but as one colleague told me about evaluating the papers of a scientist applying for a job, “They may count them and they may weigh them, but they won’t read them!”
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Here’s a 17-minute Facebook video, in Russian, from Ilia Simanovsky via Anna Krylov. It shows an orange cat being rescued from a tree. You don’t have to understand Russian to see what’s going one, but here’s a Google translation:
I recommend a doc. the film. A Vasechkin man from Irkutsk removes a cat from the top of a pine tree. The wind blows, the pine swings, the cat plows, the fool climbs higher and higher, pees on Vasechkin and in general hinders in every way. For a lousy effect, it takes place at the cemetery. Complete with a Hichkovsky suspense, a happy ending and an induced faith in the incomplete hopelessness of humanity. The voiceover is particularly amazing – not a single mother word – how is it even possible? I would give me an Oscar. and the golden lion
Yes, that’s not all that clear, but watch the video. This persistent guy first tries to snag the kitty with a noose on a pole (not a great idea) but then climbs the tree, grabs the cat, and stuffs it in a bag. It’s rescued! (You didn’t think I’d put a cat tragedy on this site, did you?).
The rescuer is clearly a cat lover, and I hope he either adopted this one or found its owner.
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Finally, reader Ginger K. sent me a link to all things cat in my own town: the Windy Kitty. Click below to read; I’ll put up a few highlights. Clearly I had missed many of the feline attractions:
Excerpts (article’s bolding):
How many cats are there in Chicago?
Chicago isn’t just the Windy City—it’s also one of the cat capitals of the Midwest.
Between pet cats curled up in apartments and community cats found all over, Chicago is home to hundreds of thousands of felines. While exact numbers are hard to pin down, estimates suggest there are around 200,000 to 500,000 community cats living outdoors in the Chicago area.
As for owned cats, the city’s love for feline companionship runs deep. Some estimates put the number of owned cats in Chicago at roughly 600,000 or more, with about 41% of pet-owning households including at least one cat. Statewide, Illinois has around 1.6 million pet cats—so Chicago likely accounts for a significant share of that total.
These combined figures mean that there may be close to a million cats total in and around Chicago when both owned and community cats are counted.
Where to see cats in Chicago?
Two standout spots for seeing (and supporting) cats near the city are Barb’s Precious Rescue in Palatine and the West Suburban Humane Society in Downers Grove — both GiveLitter® shelter partners. Both are not far from downtown Chicago and offer warm, welcoming environments for visitors who want to spend time with cats in need of homes.
Located in Palatine, a northwest suburb of Chicago, Barb’s Precious Rescue is a volunteer-run rescue organization dedicated to saving and rehoming cats and kittens from all walks of life.
What to do in Chicago if you love cats.
If you like playing video games while cats walk on your back and into your lap, then the Catcade might be your new favorite spot.
Located [at 624] West Belmont Ave., this non-profit arcade-themed cafe is devoted to rescuing cats from life-threatening situations. The cats at this cafe are available for adoption. It’s highly recommended that you make a reservation first, and don’t forget to check out their awesome merch
It costs $20 for a visit, and the dosh goes to rescuing kitties, so it’s money well spent. And it must be popular: here’s today’s schedule—full up!
And two random facts about cats and Chicago:
- Where cat fancy began – Chicago is home to one of the first cat fancier associations in the United States: The Beresford Cat Club of America. Established at a cat show in 1899, the organization was named after Lady Marcus Beresford, a notable cat breeder and the founder of the Cat Club of England.
- Cats and rats – Chicago may be known more as a dog city, but cats are in high demand in a city that’s repeatedly named the “rattiest” in America. The Tree House Humane Society saw this rat infestation as an opportunity to put their best hunters to work. They deployed 1,000 feral cats to particularly ratty areas and quickly saw a decline in the rat population.
I see rat signs all over Hyde Park, but I’ve never seen a rat in my many years here. The cats must be doing a good job.
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Finally, TWO items of lagniappe today. First, Bootsy returned home over a year after a flood separated her from her staff!
Extra lagniappe: Shorty’s first encounter with snow. You can only imagine what’s going through that cat’s mind as it encounter the cold white stuff. He seems to like it, and even tastes it, but lasts only two minutes before going back inside. (Sound up.)
h/t: Ginger K.
Jeebus. I understand gaming the h-index system. Pretty straight-forward as was demonstrated. I do not understand how human subject matter experts doing the evaluation of candidates for hire or promotion can be gamed. In my technical field, I was pretty much aware of who was doing what in the U.S and NATO countries for high level hires. I would know their research, their papers (and usually them personally) from conferences, and their trail over the years of peer-reviewed journal articles. So h-index was irrelevant in our committee’s evaluation discussions. If I were hiring a fresh-out PhD, I would not expect or care about an h-index because all I care about is his/her advisor, the thesis research, and the interview. And if they have done a post-doc, I care about that work and any publications that came out of it…way too early to worry about them being cited. A fresh-out BS or MS, I would like a writing sample from when they coauthored with someone senior or did a conference paper or the like. In any case, I don’t need no stinkin’ blind h-index in any case where subject matter expert humans are doing evaluations.
Of course if HR bureaucrats are blindly cranking applications through an ai software machine, that’s a different kettle of fish…and it does stink…I hate ai!
I just saw your post after submitting mine below. In our department, which crossed the entire range of the geological sciences from paleontology (biology) to crystallography (an aspect solid state physics) the people doing the annual evaluations, including me, didn’t have deep knowledge of what we were evaluating. We did our best, but there was uncertainty regarding how to evaluate people’s contributions. I’m sure that some looked at the Science Citation Index for assistance (those words were spoken on occasion), but I was impressed with how careful people were in carrying out those annual evaluations.
For hiring purposes, yes, the folks on the search committee knew what they needed to know without counting citations. But even with new hires, the entire department voted on the candidates, so not everyone involved was an expert. They relied on an interview with the candidate, outside letters of recommendation, the job talk, and the opinions of those in the department who were in the same field.
Yes Norman, for high-grade promotions (civil service GS-14/15), we had a committee of division chiefs from the seven divisions who while deeply knowledgable of their own field and maybe an adjacent one or two, but not everything from soup to nuts or in our case aerodynamics to crew systems to electromagnetics. So each candidate had a one-pager summary and an attached publications list, and each division chief was in full throated used car salesman mode representing his candidates. Or as one of my colleagues used to say each year: it’s time to swap lies again. But as with your department, most of the chiefs worked hard to understand what the candidates had accomplished, perhaps hampered mostly by a tendency to more heavily support what they understood versus one of the less familiar disciplines. In the most egregious case that I remember, the Director for Research (like your provost i think) had to step in and point out that discovering the 12th term of an infinite asymptotic expansion may not be as important as discovering why a certain type of airplane in the fleet was crashing, killing pilots, and creating design criteria for manufacturing modifications to prevent it.
Regarding Larry and his h-index… . When I was a professor, we submitted annual reviews to the department for purposes of deciding on raises and promotions. Every year, some faculty members would complain that their raises were inadequate or that they should have been promoted. A common refrain was that those on the review committee—I served for a time—“could count but couldn’t weigh.” Translation: You make too much of such numerical measures as citations, but not enough about the impact of the work. It would seem that this criticism is still current.
Amazingly, I saw that video in Russian of a man rescuing a cat. I don’t know how I came across it, but I did. I must be getting close to the reaching the end of the internet. Even so, some good content remains to be found.
In Chicago, it’s good to see that people are lining up to save cats. Those poor kitties in the street must have a hard time with Chicago’s brutal winters.
Finally, regarding Shorty’s encounter with snow. Her tail was pretty big. Her reaction appeared to be a mixture of curiosity and apprehension. Such a familiar scene.
Excellent Caturday!
I like how “Hitchcock” went into Russian and came back out as “Hichkovsky”… or at least, that’s what it looks like happened.
The video of the cat rescue was fascinating. I had never seen that type of tree climbing equipment in use. When he looked down, and showed us how high he was, my stomach physically reacted! I would not have assumed those thin branches would support a man’s weight but indeed they do. Most of the weight is being held by the trunk, but there is still quite a bit of load on those small branches. He also used them as steps. He obviously knew exactly what he was doing, but my heart was still pounding a bit. Got to love a cat lover!
May Larry the most cited cat write many more nonsense papers. It’s clear that the vetting process in some periodicals are lacking.
The Russian man who rescued the cat in the tree is a hero as far as I’m concerned. That cat was clearly owned by someone, as it was so calm when it was safe with him in the truck. Several years ago an arborist in a nearby town climbed a similar evergreen tree to rescue a cat. She had been near the top of the tree for days, and the owner was beside herself. My only hope: she would keep the cat inside after all that. And the arborist did all that work for free. Obviously a cat person.
It’s wonderful that Chicago has all of those cat places, and I hope there are many more, given the bitter winters.
Love the cat in the snow. In the “olden” days when my cats and I lived with my parents, the latter thought the cats should have access to the outside, including in winter. Two of the cats loved to jump up in the air to catch tiny snowballs that I made–only to wonder where they had gone when the balls landed in the snow and disappeared. That really mystified them.
Thanks for a great Caturday again!
Cat as author on paper! What next? 🐈🐈🐈
Thank you for another great Caturday!
I was surprised to read that Chicago is the rattiest city in the US. I automatically thought of NYC with its rats the size of small cars.
As I watched these videos, my own cat was on my lap watching them with me. She was fascinated!
Again not able to see lahiappes. But loved the Russian climb!