From afar, Juan Manuel Corchado’s inauguration as rector of the University of Salamanca earlier this year probably seemed like a natural and well-deserved finishing touch to the career of this outstanding academic. After all, Corchado, a very prolific computer scientist, is one of the researchers most cited in Spainwhich demonstrates the high regard that his work enjoys among his colleagues.
But, as EL PAÍS has been reporting for months, Corchado’s impressive reputation as an academic could be undeserved. Many of his quotes come from his own works, and unsound works at that: short presentations of conferences that Corchado uploaded to his website and then referenced, as we were the first to point out in 2022. The case has now drawn the attention of the Spanish Research Ethics Committee, which has urged the University of Salamanca to exercise “its powers of inspection and sanction” in the face of “the alleged bad practices” of Corchado.
Why did these bad practices help Corchado and his university? Because a large part of the criteria of the different rankings —factors that help determine funding from government agencies as well as compete for student enrollment—are based in dating, which are especially easy to manipulate. In other words, the better scientists look on paper, the better impression one has of their institutions.
The case of Corchado is nothing more than a notorious example of what the obsession with measurements has caused. In Vietnam, researchers can’t stop talking about a classification system that has just been released, but the media They consider it “chaotic” and full of errors. Last week, The Economist published a flattering article about science in China. “China has become a scientific superpower,” the magazine declared, and “leads the index of Naturecreated by the publishing house of the same name, which counts contributions to articles that appear in a set of prestigious publications.”
Which The Economist omitted – but which, however, I had already pointed out before— is that China is responsible for well over half of the more than 50,000 retracted studies in the world, a dubious distinction that can be directly attributed to the rigorous attention the country pays to measurements. Until these practices were officially banned in 2020, Chinese researchers received large cash bonuses for publishing articles in journals included in the index. Natureand clinical faculty in medical schools—whose work does not involve research—were required to publish articles to earn positions and be promoted, despite lacking training to do so.
These incentives were, in essence, direct invitations to commit fraud, as has been demonstrated a recent survey to researchers in China. How else were academics supposed to further their careers if not by increasing their output, creating dating circles or even going to fraudulent study factories?
While it’s easy to blame the Chinese government for the dating arms race, universities have done nothing to stop it and, in many cases, have even encouraged the system to work exactly as it does. In India, for example, a dental school came up with what one detractor called “disgusting plan” of self-citations to rise to the top of the classification in your specialty. In Saudi Arabia, some universities They hired prominent mathematicians as honorary professors so that their appointments would count in the classification of their institutions.
Which brings us back to Corchado. It’s not clear why he quoted himself so much, because he never responded to our requests for comment two years ago, except to say that he had broken an arm and it would take a while to respond. But, at that moment, Alberto Martin Martinan expert in bibliometrics at the University of Granada, pointed out that Spain still pays a lot of attention to the impact factor of publications to evaluate the production of its researchers, even more than in other countries.
In a way, public opinion should thank Corchado for raising alarm bells in EL PAÍS and in the Spanish Research Ethics Committee. Whether or not he remains rector of the University of Salamanca is less important than the fact that this episode causes real change in Spain and the rest of the world. There are movements afoot, including the Declaration on Research Evaluation (DORA) and the Leiden Manifestoto encourage a move away from citations and other measurements and toward strategies that reward the kind of research culture we want and need.
Universities and governments have an opportunity to reform their assessment strategies before things get even worse. They can replace them with the usual way of evaluating researchers’ work: reading it.
Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky are the founders of Retraction Watchan American organization specialized in scientific fraud.
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