That’s weird. With every paper I’ve published (in chemistry) the authors don’t handle the metadata. We upload our article sources (in latex or word) and the publisher handles the rest. I’ve never done anything more.

Is this different in other fields? Or in sketchy journals?

It seems like it's being done entirely on the publisher end, with them – or friends – benefiting:

> For example, a single researcher who was associated with Technoscience Academy benefited from more than 3,000 additional illegitimate citations. Some journals from the same publisher benefited from a couple hundred additional sneaked citations.

Perhaps this publisher or others also offer this as some kind of backroom deal / service.

"The post caught the attention of several sleuths who are now the authors of the JASIST article. We used a scientific search engine to look for articles citing the initial article. Google Scholar found none, but Crossref and Dimensions did find references. The difference? Google Scholar is likely to mostly rely on the article's main text to extract the references appearing in the bibliography section, whereas Crossref and Dimensions use metadata provided by publishers."

So Google Scholar uses the text which is good. Then obvious solution is to go and look up where it has been cited, which would be easy to do with google scholar.

I don't know why anyone would jeopardize their career like this.

This looks like someone on the editorial side snuck the references in. Don't think authors have a way to do it.

> I don't know why anyone would jeopardize their career like this.

Publish or perish.

Great plan. Nobody has _ever_ worked out ways to game Google's search algorithms!