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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 wher

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.

j7ake 2y ago
He’s a rector because he has a high H index. Nobody cares how you get to such an index unless you commit fraud. I think technically creating citing cartels is not breaking any research rules. Unethical but within the rules.
- progbits 2y ago
  But why would the university want a guy like that as their rector? It tarnishes the name of the school.
  - chucksmash 2y ago
    > 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. Ran unopposed, elected on 6.5% of the vote.
    - rightbyte 2y ago
      Oh dear. They really need to change the rules such that losing against blank would postpone the appointment, or something.
    - Almondsetat 2y ago
      How to blank votes count as protest in an election where there isn't a threshold? Protesting would mean getting some random guy to also run and make him win
      - matthewdgreen 2y ago
        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.
    - brabel 2y ago
      A Rector like this makes some serious money. Shouldn't other staff members be jumping at the chance?? There should be lots of candidates, no?
      - Der_Einzige 2y ago
        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.
      - PeterisP 2y ago
        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.
    - ambicapter 2y ago
      > 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.
      - lambdaxyzw 2y ago
        Would it be better if he got 100% of votes for him? He was the only candidate, nothing most people working there could go.
- ProjectArcturis 2y ago
  Forcing your subordinates to cite 20 of your unrelated papers is clear and obvious fraud.
  - Daub 2y ago
    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).
- Bluestein 2y ago
  This is a local speciality. Sometimes, even outside.-
- cycomanic 2y ago
  > 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).
  - CoastalCoder 2y ago
    > Not true, citation cartels are unethical research practices, there is no question about it. Perhaps this is obvious to others, but could you articulate the ethical principle that this violates?
    - cycomanic 2y ago
      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-policies/misconduct/ https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/editorial-polici...
- PeterisP 2y ago
  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.
cess11 2y ago
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.
- edflsafoiewq 2y ago
  Who supplies the grant money? They should have a motivation to end fraud.
  - Maken 2y ago
    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.
  - cess11 2y ago
    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.
    - wongarsu 2y ago
      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
pmayrgundter 2y ago
> do clique detection and downrank such citations. Sounds like a great project for someone, especially someone in academia, to lead. Call it the C-index, after Corchado, and test it against his network
ProjectArcturis 2y ago
>It should be trivial to do clique detection and downrank such citations. How would you distinguish between a clique and a group of people who cite each other because they work on the same topic?
- eviks 2y ago
  Check the article after this quote "Their tricks are so crude that anyone who takes a look can easily spot them"
  - nradov 2y ago
    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.
    - supriyo-biswas 2y ago
      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.
      - Ma8ee 2y ago
        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.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - nradov 2y ago
        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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
hammock 2y ago
> 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
eviks 2y ago
This is tolerated because this is pervasive, and throwing stones in a glass house is neither safe nor rewarding
- matthewdgreen 2y ago
  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.
  - Der_Einzige 2y ago
    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.
    - __float 2y ago
      Comparing the recent news from Harvard to the long-running scandal at Stanford doesn't seem like a fair comparison.
    - mistrial9 2y ago
      wasn't it the President of Stanford recently?
    - matthewdgreen 2y ago
      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."
      - izacus 2y ago
        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.
mycologos 2y ago
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.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  The university gets a cut of his grants after all
janoc 2y ago
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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- leereeves 2y ago
  > 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.)
mistrial9 2y ago
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?
cscurmudgeon 2y ago
> 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.

j7ake 2y ago

He’s a rector because he has a high H index. Nobody cares how you get to such an index unless you commit fraud. I think technically creating citing cartels is not breaking any research rules. Unethical but within the rules.

progbits 2y ago
But why would the university want a guy like that as their rector? It tarnishes the name of the school.
- chucksmash 2y ago
  > 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. Ran unopposed, elected on 6.5% of the vote.
  - rightbyte 2y ago
    Oh dear. They really need to change the rules such that losing against blank would postpone the appointment, or something.
  - Almondsetat 2y ago
    How to blank votes count as protest in an election where there isn't a threshold? Protesting would mean getting some random guy to also run and make him win
    - matthewdgreen 2y ago
      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.
  - brabel 2y ago
    A Rector like this makes some serious money. Shouldn't other staff members be jumping at the chance?? There should be lots of candidates, no?
    - Der_Einzige 2y ago
      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.
    - PeterisP 2y ago
      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.
  - ambicapter 2y ago
    > 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.
    - lambdaxyzw 2y ago
      Would it be better if he got 100% of votes for him? He was the only candidate, nothing most people working there could go.
ProjectArcturis 2y ago
Forcing your subordinates to cite 20 of your unrelated papers is clear and obvious fraud.
- Daub 2y ago
  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).
Bluestein 2y ago
This is a local speciality. Sometimes, even outside.-
cycomanic 2y ago
> 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).
- CoastalCoder 2y ago
  > Not true, citation cartels are unethical research practices, there is no question about it. Perhaps this is obvious to others, but could you articulate the ethical principle that this violates?
  - cycomanic 2y ago
    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-policies/misconduct/ https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/editorial-polici...
PeterisP 2y ago
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.

cess11 2y ago

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.

edflsafoiewq 2y ago
Who supplies the grant money? They should have a motivation to end fraud.
- Maken 2y ago
  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.
- cess11 2y ago
  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.
  - wongarsu 2y ago
    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

pmayrgundter 2y ago

> do clique detection and downrank such citations. Sounds like a great project for someone, especially someone in academia, to lead. Call it the C-index, after Corchado, and test it against his network

ProjectArcturis 2y ago

>It should be trivial to do clique detection and downrank such citations. How would you distinguish between a clique and a group of people who cite each other because they work on the same topic?

eviks 2y ago
Check the article after this quote "Their tricks are so crude that anyone who takes a look can easily spot them"
- nradov 2y ago
  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.
  - supriyo-biswas 2y ago
    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.
    - Ma8ee 2y ago
      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.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - nradov 2y ago
      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.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

hammock 2y ago

> 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

eviks 2y ago

This is tolerated because this is pervasive, and throwing stones in a glass house is neither safe nor rewarding

matthewdgreen 2y ago
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.
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  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.
  - __float 2y ago
    Comparing the recent news from Harvard to the long-running scandal at Stanford doesn't seem like a fair comparison.
  - mistrial9 2y ago
    wasn't it the President of Stanford recently?
  - matthewdgreen 2y ago
    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."
    - izacus 2y ago
      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.

mycologos 2y ago

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.

kjkjadksj 2y ago
The university gets a cut of his grants after all

janoc 2y ago

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.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
leereeves 2y ago
> 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.)

mistrial9 2y ago

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?

cscurmudgeon 2y ago

> 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.