The Spanish Research Ethics Committee has urged the University of Salamanca to exercise “its powers of inspection and sanction” in the face of “the alleged bad practices” of its rector, Juan Manuel Corchado, according to a report dated June 11 to which EL PAÍS has had access. Corchado, professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, boasts of being one of the scientists most cited in the world in his field, but this apparent success is based on citing himself thousands of times, in dozens of fake profiles dedicated to summoning him and demanding that their workers also summon him even if it was not appropriate, as this newspaper has revealed since March.
The report of the group of experts—requested on May 3 by the biologist Juan Cruz Cigudosa, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Universities—urges to act. “Since the competence of this committee is to ensure scientific integrity and ethics and given the alleged seriousness of the facts, this committee considers an exhaustive and independent verification of them by the competent authorities to be essential and unavoidable,” the document states. . The Government and the autonomous communities created the Spanish Research Ethics Committee a little over a year ago, chaired by Jordi Camidirector of the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park.
The committee’s powers are very limited, with no ability to call for testimony or sanction, but it is an independent body that can issue reports and recommendations of an advisory nature. “The committee considers that some of the public facts could violate good scientific practices,” warns the document, which it cites as a reference the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity.
Corchado, born in Salamanca 53 years ago, directs the BISITE research group, with more than 200 workers, including his brother Emilio. The team manages projects worth millions of euros, achieved with the help of this false international scientific prestige. The group’s internal messages, to which EL PAÍS has had access, reveal that Corchado demanded that his workers meet him at their studios, to rig the rankings of the most cited researchers in the world.
On June 7, 2017, for example, a professor’s assistant wrote to other subordinates: “Collect everything you have (master’s thesis, final degree projects, degree final projects, thesis, etc.) and include in the same 20 references among those that I attach in the Word document.” The attached file included almost fifty Corchado publications. After a while, the collaborator insisted: “As I know that we are all working hard now, to make it easier, I am attaching the references just to copy and paste.”
Corchado used the GREDOS scientific repository of the University of Salamanca to upload documents full of citations to himself, which were detected and counted by the Google Scholar search engine. The professor even published a single paragraph on intelligent buildings with 227 quotes himselfincluding mentions of work that had nothing to do with it, such as studies on cancer diagnosis or red tides of microalgae.
After being questioned by this newspaper in March, Corchado carried out a massive deletion of these suspicious documents in the GREDOS repository. The ethics committee disgraces this behavior. “The University of Salamanca signed the Berlin Declaration on open access to knowledge in the sciences and humanities, a declaration that commits the repository to ensuring its documentary integrity. This is essential for science,” emphasizes the group of experts, which again urges the competent authorities to “verify the situation.” EL PAÍS has asked since March Ferreras Transitcoordinator of GREDOS, for this massive deletion of documents, without receiving a response.
The professor from Salamanca and his group organize the PAAMS international conference every year, with six simultaneous conferences and a price of up to 585 euros per assistant. In the words of Felipe Meneguzzi, professor of Computing at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland), “the PAAMS conference is known for being a bit predatory: they accept papers from anyone who has a pulse.” A look at the Web of Science database shows that Juan Manuel Corchado and his brother Emilio occupy the sixth and fourth positions among the researchers in Spain who have published the most publications, including more than 2,000 from their network of conferences.
Corchado used the conference proceedings, published by the Springer publishing house, to inflate its scientific impact with tricks. The results of his dating cartel are easily observable. The mathematician Roberto Casado Vara, a disciple of the professor, signed on January 9, 2019 a publication on computer security in electrical distribution networks. 94% of the references were citations to previous studies by Corchado, even if they had nothing to do with it: works on the risk of bladder cancer, oil spills, red tides, CO₂ in the ocean.
In just 75 publications in Springer, a handful of contributors cite Corchado almost 1,700 times and another 520 times Magazine ADCAIJ, directed by the professor. The publisher Springer Nature has launched an investigation into Salamanca, according to the organization’s director of scientific integrity, Chris Graf. Another publisher, Elsevier, already retracted a study by Corchado and three collaborators in 2019 for plagiarizing a master’s thesis.
The ethics committee recalls that the American organization Retraction Watch, specialized in scientific fraud, already revealed “the alleged bad practices” of the Spanish professor in March 2022. Those first information did not provoke any internal investigation at the University of Salamanca nor did they stop the career of Corchado, who on May 7 won the elections for rector after presenting himself as the only candidate. At his inauguration ceremony on May 31 in the university auditorium, he received a one minute ovation, despite the fact that his traps were already known. The president of Research Ethics Committee from the University of Salamanca, Bertha Gutierrezis one of the vice-rectors of Corchado.
The report of the national ethics committee clearly points out the institution. “The University of Salamanca, as an entity that protects or maintains employment ties with people who may have committed or been affected by the alleged bad practices, must act by exercising its powers of inspection and sanction. “Such verifications are essential to preserve the reputation and prestige of the Spanish university and scientific system and to protect people and things,” the document states.
“Finally, this Committee wants to emphasize that Spanish society relies on scientific research for its progress and well-being, and has high trust in university professors and the scientific community. It is, therefore, the duty of institutions to safeguard such trust by transmitting and being exemplary in the values of ethics and scientific integrity,” the report concludes.
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