The Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, led by Diana Morant, has requested an investigation into the new rector of the University of Salamanca, Juan Manuel Corchado, from the Spanish Research Ethics Committee, as confirmed to EL PAÍS by a ministerial spokesperson. On March 15 and April 26, this newspaper published evidence that the professor, born in Salamanca 52 years ago, has inflated his scientific impact with tricks for years, including thousands of irrelevant self-citations in his publications, giving instructions to his workers to citing their studies and benefiting from a multitude of fraudulent profiles of non-existent researchers dedicated to compulsively mentioning their articles.
Morant’s department says it requested a report from the committee, an independent body, on May 3. created a year ago by the Government and the autonomous communities. The group, made up of a dozen experts in ethics and scientific integrity, is advisory in nature and has no sanctioning power. The chairman of the committee, the doctor Jordi Cami, confirms that they are already working on the report. Juan Manuel Corchado has tried to eliminate evidence of his cheating and in March he carried out a massive deletion of his publications in the scientific repository of the University of Salamanca, called Gredos. The coordinator of this service, Ferreras Transithas not responded for a month to the various requests for information from this newspaper.
Dozens of the posts deleted, however, they are still on the internet thanks to CORE, a British platform that compiles studies from a multitude of academic repositories around the world. Anyone can see Corchado’s traps with their own eyes. One of the deleted documents, from May 2021, is just a paragraph about smart cities, with 227 quotes yourself. In another work, titled Intelligent models for epidemic predictionsthe teacher includes three paragraphs and he quotes himself a hundred times. His thousands of self-citations, added to other tricks, make Corchado one of the most cited scientists in Spain in different rankings.
The professor won the elections for rector on May 7, after receiving 2,131 votes in favor, just 6.5% of the 33,000 university students who were called to vote. Almost half of the permanent professors (tenured and full professors) who voted did so blankly, after a campaign to express themselves in this way as a sign of protest. Corchado presented himself as the only candidate in the elections, called urgently after the surprise resignation of the previous rector, Ricardo Rivero, and his provisional replacement, María José Rodríguez Conde.
Outrage grows on campus at Corchado’s silence. Alberto Santamaríaprofessor of Art History at the University of Salamanca, tweeted on May 11: “The only acceptable solution right now is his resignation and the calling of elections with a time margin that allows the concurrence of several candidates. The rest are stories.” The teacher José Manuel Bustos Gisbertgrammar expert, proclaimed the same day: “I feel that the honor of the University of Salamanca is in question. Therefore, it is my obligation to demand an immediate, clear and conclusive explanation from the elected rector Juan Manuel Corchado. Silence is not worth it. “He is an accomplice.”
A spokesperson for the Ministry emphasizes that the report on Corchado was requested four days before the rector elections, respecting the presumption of innocence and to determine whether a case of scientific malpractice has occurred. One of the functions of the committee is to “issue reports, proposals and recommendations on matters related to scientific integrity, responsible research and professional ethics in scientific and technical research,” according to the Royal Decree which approved its regulations on January 31, 2023. These reports can be issued ex officio or at the request of the minister.
The only acceptable solution right now is his resignation and the calling of elections
Alberto Santamaría, professor at the University of Salamanca
Corchado lied in March in the only explanations he has offered after the EL PAÍS revelations. He claimed that his documents containing thousands of self-citations were class exercises, but this was false. The professor even added more than 200 references to himself in all types of publications signed only by him. Multiple profiles of invented scientists, appearing in the ResearchGate repository, also published pseudostudies with many citations to Salamanca. When this newspaper asked him about these fake individuals, Corchado assured that he had not created them, but stated that he had just deleted them thanks to his knowledge in cybersecurity. A ResearchGate spokesperson, however, stated that there was no evidence of a computer attack and that only the author of a profile can delete it by entering his or her password.
A user with the name of Brian Lees, from the University of Paisley (today called the University of Western Scotland), included the same 37 citations to Corchado in different studies posted on ResearchGate with dates ranging from 2001 to 2013. Always the same 37 citations, regardless of the topic of the work. The person responsible for academic integrity of the institution, Helen Kennedyhas declined to respond to this newspaper’s questions about Brian Lees and his 37 perpetual quotes to Corchado.
The professor is widely cited in different rankings because it is also hyperprolific, with more than one publication a week for years. Before the mass deletion, Corchado had 45,000 citations and 2,100 documents registered in your Google Scholar profile, deactivated since March. In another database, Scopus, you have 12,000 quotes and 750 documents.
That inflated scientific impact has helped him capture million-dollar projects. On March 18, three days after EL PAÍS uncovered its traps, Corchado presented together with the mayor of Salamanca, Carlos García Carbayo, and the Minister of Economy of the Junta de Castilla y León, Carlos Fernández Carriedo (both from the Popular Party) , the International Video Game and Animation Innovation Pole, a project endowed with 2.5 million euros from the Junta de Castilla y León for the AIR Institute, a private entity created by the Salamancan professor. A year ago, the Salamanca City Council gave a 700,000-euro building to the AIR Institute of Corchado, to direct a 3.5-million-euro project to promote the digitalization of companies in the region.
The socialist Government has also awarded the professor, who in February showed off having received the maximum funding from the Secretary of State for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence, 1.2 million euros, to create the International Chair of Reliable AI and Demographic Challenge of the University of Salamanca. In March, Corchado announced that the National Cybersecurity Institute had awarded him the International Chair in Blockchain for Cybersecurity “Cyberchain”. “We are talking, in total, of almost 4 million euros between the two chairs,” proclaimed the man from Salamanca in their website.
In Abu Dhabi he presented a project in November Two millions of euros related to digital currencies. In Qatar, it has a project almost a million euros to manage the energy consumption of buildings. Corchado will take office this Monday, but the academic event will be held on May 31 with the presence of the president of the Board, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco, according to The Salamanca Gazette. The university has an annual budget of 290 million euros. Corchado has announced that he wants to build a new campus in Salamanca.
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