The great Saudi university farce is coming to an end. The number of highly cited scientists who claim to work in Saudi Arabia has fallen 76% since April last year, when EL PAÍS revealed the existence of a scheme in which foreign researchers were paid up to €70,000 (nearly $74,000) a year to lie about their workplaces, in order to artificially inflate Saudi institutions in international academic rankings. Chemist Damià Barceló, for example, falsely declared between 2016 and 2022 that his main affiliation was King Saud University in Riyadh, when in reality he was director of the Catalan Water Research Institute in Girona, in the northeast of Spain.
In 2022, Saudi Arabia had 109 professors on the prestigious list of most cited researchers, established by the multinational Clarivate along with the 7,000 researchers worldwide whose studies are most cited by other colleagues. The more members a university has on this list, the higher it will appear in the Shanghai Rankings, the most influential ranking of global 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 revealed by this newspaper, their number was reduced from 109 to 76 at the end of 2023. In the new list, published on November 19, only 26 remain, including Spanish environmentalists Carlos Duarte and Fernando Maestre, who actually moved and worked at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in the Saudi city of Thuwal.
The list of most cited researchers has attracted all kinds of cheating in recent years, as some scientists got on the list using tricks such as being cited on an industrial scalepublishing insubstantial studies every week, or agree with other researchers to cite each other. Clarivate analyst David Pendlebury explained in a statement that his company strengthened its filters this year, to “identify researchers and their co-authors involved in misconduct of all kinds”, in particular those who manipulate the citations of their work. Clarivate has only excluded 300 scientists from its 2021 list for fraudulent practices. In 2022, there were 500. In 2023, a thousand. And this year, there were a record 2,000 exclusions: nearly one in three researchers, apparently highly cited, were caught engaging in bad practices.
Swiss analyst Yoran Beldengrün revealed the global dimension of Saudi deception. In just ten years, 210 highly cited foreign scientists said their primary place of work was a university in Saudi Arabia. Most of them came from China (44), Spain (19), the United States (16) and Turkey (14), according to a report by Beldengrün prepared for the specialist consultancy SIRIS Academic, based in Barcelona. For this analyst, the “huge drop” in the number of highly cited scientists claiming to work in Saudi Arabia is “a good step towards research integrity”.
The University of Cordoba in southern Spain suspended chemist Rafael Luque without pay for 13 years after it was discovered he had falsely declared his main place of work to be King Saud University. His case, revealed by EL PAÍSwas the most read article in this journal in 2023, and it aroused international astonishment. Because of this lie, the Córdoba institution lost around 150 places in the Shanghai ranking, thus falling out of the top 800, according to calculations by SIRIS Academic. Nature magazine, reference for world science, picked up on Luque’s case and this newspaper’s subsequent investigation into the fake Saudi affiliation scheme. For mathematician Domingo Docampo, who for years has denounced the tricks used to climb academic rankings, this global repercussion was crucial.
“It seems that the international coverage of bad practices linked to academic affiliation and the fact that high-level scientific journals have taken up and commented on them are bearing fruit,” says Docampo, former rector of the University of Vigo. in the northwest of Spain. “It appears that Clarivate has taken note and included this behavior, as well as the high levels of self-citations, suspected collusion (cartels), and cases reported by Retraction watch (an American organization specializing in scientific fraud),” adds the mathematician.
The disappearance of the fake Saudi professors is a blow for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, considered by the United States to be responsible for the journalist’s murder. Jamal Khashoggi. Bin Salman has set a goal of placing at least five Saudi universities among the world’s top 200 by 2030. Without this trick, his establishments will collapse in the rankings. King Saud University, falsely reported as the primary affiliation of Spanish chemists Damià Barceló and Rafael Luque, went from 38 highly cited scientists to just a dozen in a year.
King Abdulaziz University, in the Saudi city of Jeddah, has been one of the most active institutions in recruiting Spanish researchers willing to lie, thanks in part to mathematician Juan Luis García Guirao, a professor at the Polytechnic University of Cartagena, who served as an intermediary between the university and at least a dozen national scientists, according to the EL PAÍS investigation. King Abdulaziz University claimed to have 12 highly cited researchers last year. The new list does not include any of them.
The proportion of highly cited researchers in Saudi Arabia – almost one in 200 professors – was so high that it was five or even ten times higher than the percentages observed in Germany, Spain and France, according to SIRIS Academic data. Another Saudi institution involved was Taif University, an hour’s drive from Mecca. Food technologist Francisco Tomás Barberán said he worked there in 2020, when in reality he was carrying out research at the Segura Center for Soil Science and Applied Biology, in the Murcia region of eastern Spain. The Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), which oversees the center, opened disciplinary proceedings a year ago against five members involved in the Saudi plot to improve the ranking of its universities.
The 2024 list of most cited researchers includes some 6,600 people, 36% of whom are from the United States, compared to 43% in 2018. This loss of American representation is explained by the growth of China, which increased from 8%. in 2018 to 20% today. The Chinese Academy of Sciences, which brings together more than 100 institutes, is the global organization with the largest number of highly cited researchers, reaching a total of 308. The American universities of Harvard (231) and Stanford (133) occupy second and third places. places. Spain was in 2021 the ninth country in the world with the most scientists on this list, with 1.7%, but now occupies 13th place with 1.5% (99).
David Pendlebury, analyst at Clarivate, explains that his team introduced new filters after detecting “citation exchanges” between researchers, who agree to cite each other to climb the rankings. In October, the publisher Springer Nature suddenly removed 75 studies by Juan Manuel Corchado, rector of the University of Salamancaand its collaborators for this type of fraudulent practice.
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