Can someone please explain how this is tolerated? Why is the guy not a laughing stock but a rector?
I could understand if it was some clever hidden cartel where people sneak in extra references that seem plausible, spread out over many people and articles. But to juts have cite only this guys garbage papers?
Also the citation / H-index metric clearly need improvements. It should be trivial to do clique detection and downrank such citations.
A somewhat rude answer may be that, despite being very old, University of Salamanca is not prestigious -- outside of the top 500 in all major global university rankings -- and is therefore more likely to be willing to employ somebody who can fake their way into appearing to be a high-impact researcher.
> Can someone please explain how this is tolerated? Why is the guy not a laughing stock but a rector?
Some good answers already in the comments and I just want to point out that we need to stop lending so much credence to authority and titles and better recognize that it is perfectly possible to both hold a “prestigious,” even elected title like Rector or priest or President or judge or District Attorney and be a laughing stock at the same time
It is next to impossible to detect despite being so crude.
Unless there is an explicit suspicion, nobody is going to systematically check all your citations and papers. There are simply too many of these things to do that systematically, for every researcher, grad student or professor.
The universities don't have resources for something like that - that would mean hiring multiple people doing just work like that full time. And it still wouldn't uncover the slightly more sophisticated cases, such as the professor getting a "mandatory citation" on every paper produced by the students working in their lab.
How do you think can a professor publish 20-30 journal papers a year (that's both a very common number and still quite low) when getting a single paper written and shepherded through the review process takes months in the best case and could take even 2 years in the worst for the large journals?
Yes, all the work is done by the grad students and assistant profs - and the professor's name gets added to the list of authors as a sign of respect (in the best case) or because they were told to do that (in the worst one). This is an extremely common practice.
I have personally witnessed one guy build essentially an entire fake academic career like this, by pushing grad students to credit him for work he didn't do - and he almost got away with it. He didn't obtain a tenured position at a prestigious European university only because one of the professors in the tenure committee worked with him before and knew how did he obtain those (on paper) stellar research credentials - and vetoed it.
Moreover, most of the metrics like impact factor are just a number. You can't see what they have been calculated from. Research has always been built on individual integrity and honesty. And there will always be bad apples that abuse it.
The motivations and what is on stake (your career, job, grants, etc.) are so skewed that a lot of people feel pushed into cheating like this.
> all the work is done by the grad students and assistant profs - and the professor's name gets added to the list of authors as a sign of respect (in the best case) or because they were told to do that (in the worst one). This is an extremely common practice.
Just recently, Yann LeCun bragged on Twitter about publishing over 80 papers in two years.
I wondered who he thought he was impressing. Anyone who knows anything about science knows that at least the majority of those weren't his own work.
(No disrespect intended; YLC has done important work. But that tweet was not his best idea.)
Do you know what he does all day at FB? Posts links to arxiv on workplace (which is the internal/business variant of FB). Like I'm saying you can see everything he does and he had exactly zero diffs while I was there.
I mean I respect him for his contributions but what about being more specific with the contributions, like “I brought the idea” or “I supervised the research” or even “I managed the lab and arranged for the equipments with which my students conducted research”, any would be perfectly valid contributions to science. But it seems like the academic norm is just to boast “I was an author of these shiny new papers” and the details of how are obscured away almost intentionally.
Citations attract grant money. Grant money makes you attractive to the institution.
The publisher have no reason to get at this, they actually profit quite a bit from research fraud.
Which also is very common. It took a long, long while before Macchiarini's fraudulent articles were retracted, same with some of the foundational Alzheimer-placque-articles.
Grant applications are primarily judged on the perceived strength of the research plan. The reviewers work in the same field as the applicant and are expected to judge the proposal on its merits. Citation count is therefore already not a major factor in whether a grant is awarded or not, at least in engineering.
Citation counts are considered by promotion committees though. In this case, committee members are often from different fields and have less ability to judge the quality of the applicants' work for themselves.
None of the above matters in this particular case though—the problem is that Corchado was the only candidate on the ballot: "… taking advantage of the strange surprise resignation of the previous rector, and presenting himself as the only candidate. He received the support of 6.5% of the 33,000 university members who were called to vote, with half of the faculty voting blank as a sign of protest. "
The ones in charge are usually more concerned about shielding themselves from fraud accusations than actually preventing fraud. Relying on widely accepted yet flawed rankings allows them to redirect any fingers pointing at them. Nobody was ever fired for following JCR impact factor.
Why? They answer to people outside of academia, who doesn't care and don't understand, and will be happy with seeing a notice in the press about 'another 5 million to Alzheimer's research' regardless of whether it goes into a dead end or something worthwhile.
This turned into a huge setback for Alzheimer's research specifically. Politicians and their ilk poured money into 'amyloid research' so to get money that's what you had to do, even though it was rather early on pretty well known among researchers that it wasn't a fruitful way forward.
In some level they care. Everyone wants the press to write about them "X funded research cures Alzheimer". But the feedback cycles for that are long. In the short term a fraud provides at least as much good press as a genuinely great researcher, probably more. It's hard to try some new metric if it might take two decades to show that it lead to better long-term outcomes
As I'm sure you know, there is a big difference between something a human can do when they pay attention to something, vs a completely automated procedure that can be done at scale.
Yeah, I didn't catch that you have a strict requirement for full flawless automation (which the current system fails to satisfy), I thought the adjusted algorithms/indices etc would still involve some humans before having an impact
I think there is huge potential to use AI for detecting many types of academic fraud. Citations of unrelated articles should be an easy one. Flag them and then refer to human university administrators for review.
You hardly need AI for this; you only need to construct a graph of researchers with the number of citations as weights, and compare metrics of connectedness to detect cliques and other fraudulent behavior.
You're going to get a lot of false positives with such a simplistic approach. Sometimes the same group of researchers legitimately cites each other over and over because they're working on similar topics and collaborating. AI can help to reduce the false positives by looking at content to identify citations that might be out of place. Of course there will still be some false positives with any algorithm so human academic committees will still have to make the final decisions.
Unfortunately a citation, especially as a prestige or impact metric, carries associations of quality to observers outside its domain. A resource having been selected for citation implicitly signals that it wad the best choice among a field of rival candidates, yet in many cases such as you describe the truth is that it is the _only_ such work available.
This is especially problematic as some researchers build entire careers out of gatekeeping preprint access to unique, single- source primary data that only they or their lab/ staff can collect- not because of their superior ability to analyze it but because theirs is the only facility with the appropriate ensemble of apparatus on site or close at hand, or because they are the latest in a close-knit (often nepotistic) chain of custodians presiding over a certain exclusive primary source, such as a nature reserve or archaeological site.
Cliques can easily occur just by a few people researching the same thing. If you are maybe two or three research groups in the works that use a particular method to try to solve a particular problem, of course you are all going to cite each other excessively.
Yes, but we all know that the "human review" is only going to be a temporary step on the road to furthering the dystopia of 0-accountability institutions that are capable of damaging your life on the imperceptible whims of the black box and the people who train and maintain it.
I think that instead of turning over every opportunity for a human job to robots that will fail and be captured, we should be giving people those jobs. The kind of flesh bodies that are afraid of being jailed for years at a time.
It’s probably pervasive in second and third tier research universities. It’s not pervasive in top-tier universities. Actually it’s probably not pervasive in either case, but it happens more in the former.
Stanford and Harvard just had incidents where their own top researchers got caught doing academic dishonesty of the highest order. The ivy leagues are not doing citation cartels particularly less than tier two or tier three schools.
They had two (or a small number of) high-profile incidents. There have been thousands and thousands of researchers at those Universities during the tenure of those specific researchers. I'm open to an argument that these behaviors are more widespread than the 1/10,000 that these numbers would suggest. But even if it's 10x or 100x worse, that's still around 1%. Not "pervasive."
It's the other way around - this behaviour is so normalized and so common, that it's outright not reported on because it's such a part of daily academic work.
You have evidence for small rates of fraud, but you have feelings that suggest the numbers are enormous? And nobody reports on outright fraud? This is not my experience, and certainly not even remotely scientific.
Bruh lol. Thinking it doesn't happen at "top tier" universities is like thinking because the rich don't need to steal they don't. When in reality they steal just as much because why not.
I just finished my PhD at a "top tier" university. Everyone plays the same exact tricks. My group all self-cited and our collaborators and back and forth.
So there's no such thing as "top tier" as far as the quality goes, there's only higher paid.
> It should be trivial to do clique detection and downrank such citations.
Cliques are not the problem, in many niche areas, you will have natural cliques. It is hard to distinguish that from forceful citations like this. And, this may not be a clique. I don't think this guy was citing back researchers he forced to cite him.
because even hard science faculties are essentially human activities, and this is political. That human showed consistent "leader" attributes, formed a support and collaboration base of other accomplished humans in that context, and convinced everyone (apparently) that this now-obvious computer trick constituted something worth promotion. It is said repeatedly that it was "crude tricks in plain sight" .. where is the mystery?
In a poorly run academic insitutiin, this is commonplace. In an art school I worked at, all student work was required to credit the head of the school and their spouse (who also worked at the school).
> I think technically creating citing cartels is not breaking any research rules. Unethical but within the rules.
Not true, citation cartels are unethical research practices, there is no question about it.
There is also no "technically within the rules", because there are generally no specific rules.
Research rules essentially are "Don't do anything unethical", in a research ethics course you would then be given examples, like don't falsify data, dont misrepresented data, acknowledge previous work...
And while I believe the vast majority of academics follow the principles, because the rules are unspecified there is a gray zone (I believe that is a good thing we don't need to bog down scientific research by even more administration).
Well I was trying to say that there are not clear cut don't do this or that, but instead act ethically. I would say citation stacking broadly falls under misrepresenting your research (as well as other research).
The authors artifically inflate the impact of their research thus misrepresenting how important it is. It is widely viewed as misconduct e.g. see these guidelines from T&F (most other journals would have something similar) https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/editorial-polici...
> Corchado won the elections on May 7, after taking advantage of the strange surprise resignation of the previous rector, and presenting himself as the only candidate. He received the support of 6.5% of the 33,000 university members who were called to vote, with half of the faculty voting blank as a sign of protest.
This move will never cease to annoy the fuck out of me. Unless the election is somehow invalidated or recalled by the number of blank votes, it is completely counter-productive.
Nah, that's often how it works - sure, becoming a rector would mean a pay increase, but it would require you to become an administrator and stop doing what you love, most likely permanently (as the gap of being away from your field of research for multiple years makes it hard to become productive again - returning to active science is definitely possible, but rarely happens), switching your career for an entirely different one as far as day-to-day tasks go. And if you're already somewhat comfortable as a professor, why would you do that to yourself?
I've literally seen faculty 'drawing straws' as of who'll agree to be the sole candidate for a particular elected administrative position, because it's clear that one of them has to do it for the university to function, but no one wanted to.
Wait until you see how many districts for even important positions like state representative have candidates who run unopposed. You too could become a state representative if you moved to bum fuck nowhere and learned how to talk to boomers.
It’s academia. People join the academy so they can do research and teaching and absolutely nobody wants to do this crap administrative work. So often you get situations where bad people volunteer for a job that is “prestigious” but also involves shoveling manure, and you can’t convince other people to do the job instead.
No, he's not a rector because he has a high H index - he's rector because he was the only candidate who applied, and if there was a competition, that factor is barely relevant, the candidate would get chosen by a faculty subjective vote, not according to score on some metric.
I could understand if it was some clever hidden cartel where people sneak in extra references that seem plausible, spread out over many people and articles. But to juts have cite only this guys garbage papers?
Also the citation / H-index metric clearly need improvements. It should be trivial to do clique detection and downrank such citations.