  Google Scholar has been well received by the research community. Its promises
of free, universal and easy access to scientific literature as well as the
perception that it covers better than other traditional multidisciplinary
databases the areas of the Social Sciences and the Humanities have contributed
to the quick expansion of Google Scholar Citations and Google Scholar Metrics:
two new bibliometric products that offer citation data at the individual level
and at journal level. In this paper we show the results of a experiment
undertaken to analyze Google Scholar's capacity to detect citation counting
manipulation. For this, six documents were uploaded to an institutional web
domain authored by a false researcher and referencing all the publications of
the members of the EC3 research group at the University of Granada. The
detection of Google Scholar of these papers outburst the citations included in
the Google Scholar Citations profiles of the authors. We discuss the effects of
such outburst and how it could affect the future development of such products
not only at individual level but also at journal level, especially if Google
Scholar persists with its lack of transparency.
