How are PDF files published in the Scientific Community?

Abstract

Authors are often not aware of hidden information and that they can contain more information than the actual content of the file. This work mainly focuses on how PDF files are published in the scientific community. We have analyzed a corpus of 555865 PDF files to show that direct and modified authoring process of PDF creations leads to the leakage of sensitive information on the researchers. Our analysis on the extraction of the metadata has shown that at least 23% of the PDF files in our dataset contains valuable information on the authoring process. We were even able to solve the co-authorship (multiple authors) problem by crossing the information of multiple PDF files using linear algebra. We believe that, PDF sanitization needs to be included in the scientific publication processes to avoid leakage of sensitive information. We have explored and suggested necessary strategies available for the safer distribution of scientific work by researchers.