This is Larry the Cat. In recent weeks he has become the most cited cat ever, for the number of times other authors have referred to scientific papers he has written. Spookie the Cat is awfully jealous.

Larry’s “achievement” is an exercise in absurdity of course, to highlight the growing issue of paid-for research reputation boosting. It reveals flaws in Google Scholar’s productivity metrics, viz the citation count and the popular “h-index”. These are used by universities to promote researchers and award tenure, since how else can a mere university administrator tell good work from bad?

Coincidentally, counting citations is a topic lying at the very roots of Google’s ubiquitous search engine. It was an early preoccupation of Larry Page, one of the two founders of Google.

Hmm… I wonder if there’s a connection there?