scientists stop falsely claiming to work in Saudi Arabia

[cbabe]

https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2024-12-05/dozens-of-the-worlds-most-cited-scientists-stop-falsely-claiming-to-work-in-saudi-arabia.html

Dozens of the world’s most cited scientists stop falsely claiming to work in Saudi Arabia

This newspaper unveiled that Saudi universities were paying up to €70,000 a year to prestigious researchers to artificially pump up Arab institutions in international academic rankings

MANUEL ANSEDE
DEC 05, 2024 - 11:00 EST

The great Saudi university farce is coming to an end. The number of highly cited scientists who claim to work in Saudi Arabia has plummeted by 76% since April last year, when EL PAÍS revealed the existence of a scheme in which foreign researchers were being paid up to €70,000 (nearly $74,000) a year to lie about their place of employment, in order to artificially pump up Saudi institutions in international academic rankings. The chemist Damià Barceló, for example, falsely declared from 2016 to 2022 that his primary affiliation was King Saud University in Riyadh, when in reality he was the director of the Catalan Institute for Water Research in Girona, in northeastern Spain.

In 2022, Saudi Arabia boasted 109 professors on the prestigious List of Highly Cited Researchers, compiled by the multinational Clarivate with the 7,000 researchers in the world whose studies are most cited by other colleagues. The more members of this list a university has, the higher it will appear in the Shanghai Ranking, the most influential ranking of world universities. Some Saudi institutions chose to bribe highly cited foreign scientists to lie in the Clarivate database, a trick that went unnoticed for years. Following the scandal uncovered by this newspaper, the number was reduced from 109 to 76 by the end of 2023. In the new list, published on November 19, only 26 remain, including the Spanish ecologists Carlos Duarte and Fernando Maestre, who did indeed move and work at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, in the Saudi town of Thuwal.

The List of Highly Cited Researchers had attracted all kinds of cheating in recent years, as some scientists got on the list using tricks such as citing themselves on an industrial scale, publishing insubstantial studies every week, or colluding with other researchers to cite each other. David Pendlebury, an analyst at Clarivate, explained in a statement that his company has tightened its filters this year, to “identify researchers and their co-authors involved in misconduct of many kinds,” especially those who manipulate citations of their work. Clarivate excluded only 300 scientists from its 2021 list for fraudulent practices. In 2022, there were 500. In 2023, a thousand. And this year, there has been a record of 2,000 exclusions: practically one in three apparently highly cited researchers has been caught engaging in bad practices.

Swiss analyst Yoran Beldengrün has revealed the global dimension of the Saudi deception. In just a decade, 210 highly cited scientists from other countries declared that their main place of work was a university in Saudi Arabia. Most of them were from China (44), Spain (19), the United States (16) and Turkey (14), according to a report by Beldengrün prepared for the specialized consultancy SIRIS Academic, based in Barcelona. For this analyst, the “huge drop” in the number of highly cited scientists who claim to work in Saudi Arabia is “a good step towards research integrity.”

The University of Córdoba, in southern Spain, suspended the chemist Rafael Luque without pay for 13 years after discovering that he had falsely declared that his main place of work was King Saud University. His case, revealed by EL PAÍS, was the most read news article in this newspaper in 2023, and it caused international astonishment. Because of this lie, the Córdoba institution fell about 150 spots in the Shanghai Ranking, dropping out of the top 800, according to calculations by SIRIS Academic. Nature magazine, a reference for world science, picked up on Luque’s case and the subsequent investigation of the Saudi fake affiliation scheme conducted by this newspaper. For the mathematician Domingo Docampo, who has been denouncing for years the tricks used to climb the academic rankings, this global repercussion has been crucial.

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