New head of one of the world’s oldest universities organized a citation cartel

https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2024-05-31/internal-messages-show-how-the-new-head-of-one-of-the-worlds-oldest-universities-organized-a-citation-cartel.html

by belter • 2 years ago

242 122 2 years ago

english.elpais.com

airstrike• 2 years ago

University of Salamanca

strikelaserclaw• 2 years ago

the salamanca family

xqcgrek2• 2 years ago

This is a common practice is almost every research group or collaboration.

imadierich• 2 years ago

yea.... does it make it "good" though

ninjin• 2 years ago

I have plenty of nasty things to say about academia. But after about 15 years in artificial intelligence, more than 80 publications, and having worked with and interacted with 15 or so research groups, I have never seen this practice. It is possible that I have been lucky (sample size of one, too), but it is also possible that this horrible unethical behaviour is less common than in "almost every research group or collaboration". If someone have numbers with solid empirical backing, I would be happy to see them.

ProjectArcturis5• 2 years ago

No it's not. It's common to cite relevant papers from your collaborators (you are working on the same topic, after all). But it's an aberration to create a semi-formal system where you force your underlings to cite your papers in completely different fields.

miloignis• 2 years ago

Might as well through in my anacdata that I've never seen this in any of the groups I am familiar with during my time as a PhD student.

rc_mob• 2 years ago

Holy hell that guy is corrupt. The article did not comment on why the University hired him anyyand has not fired him yet. I'm very curious about that.

progbits2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years 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.

progbits2• 2 years ago

But why would the university want a guy like that as their rector? It tarnishes the name of the school.

ProjectArcturis5• 2 years ago

Forcing your subordinates to cite 20 of your unrelated papers is clear and obvious fraud.

Bluestein2• 2 years ago

This is a local speciality. Sometimes, even outside.-

cycomanic2• 2 years 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).

PeterisP2• 2 years 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.

cess114• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

Who supplies the grant money? They should have a motivation to end fraud.

pmayrgundter• 2 years 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

ProjectArcturis5• 2 years 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?

eviks3• 2 years ago

Check the article after this quote "Their tricks are so crude that anyone who takes a look can easily spot them"

hammock• 2 years 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

eviks3• 2 years ago

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

matthewdgreen5• 2 years 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.

mycologos• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

The university gets a cut of his grants after all

janoc• 2 years 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.

leereeves• 2 years 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.)

mistrial92• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

blantonl• 2 years ago

It’s funny, I think a lot of us who didn’t come through high-level academia or post-graduate education activities have this perspective that those in higher education are amazing figures, above reproach, who do amazing works in society.

As I’ve gotten older, and had more of an opportunity to interact with these players, and read articles such as these, I now have the perspective that a lot of these folks are monsters and are some of the craziest, narcissistic, abusive people on the face of the earth. They run fiefdoms and hold power over money and prestige and those under them and because they are brilliant people, they have the ability to damage so many more people around them as they do their work.

Bluestein2• 2 years ago

are monsters and are some of the craziest, narcissistic, abusive people on the face of the earth

With what might be, I am sure, obvious exceptions, I have reached the personal conclusion that academia, universities, colleges, are cespits of the absolute worst, most treachearous, most cunning worst that human nature has to offer. Far from being a meritocracy, scum "floats" to the top in these environments.-

I am really curious how this fact ties into the - recently discussed here - lack of value that people more and more perceive in college degrees.-

ProjectArcturis5• 2 years ago

I've spent 15 years in academia and 10 in industry. Academia isn't worse on a per capita basis. Leaders' flaws are rawer, mainly because hardly anyone gets leadership training. And they often have more severe consequences, especially for grad students who are put in a subordinate, dependent position for an extended period of time. But IME you're at least equally likely to find psychopaths at the top of businesses.

jfengel• 2 years ago

I've found that to be true of practically every human endeavor. The ones who achieve the most prominent positions are the ones who work the system to their advantage.

It's not merely that cheaters win. It's that they are selected for it: people want them to cheat on their behalf. And they may not even be wrong about that.

FpUser• 2 years ago

I used to be a scientist back in USSR. Can't talk about it in general but where I've worked and visited I did not encounter anything that fits your description. Sure there was dirt here and there but nothing approaching the level.

Modern corporations however from my experience are quite fitting.

cmrdporcupine• 2 years ago

I suspect you'll find at the top of all self-styled "meritocracies" are people who have socially engineered the definition of "merit" to be them and their empire. And this is the profound problem with all "meritocratic" structures. They might start out on a small scale selecting for some genuine skill, but measuring humans can be easily gamed.

A game which narcissists win and reinforces their narcissism by telling them what they want to hear about themselves.

BirAdam2• 2 years ago

Any time there is power to be had, the worst people are the most incentivized to seize it. It is the nature of power and of humans.

TrackerFF• 2 years ago

It kind of depends on how prestigious and competitive the field is.

There are plenty of fields that are "boring" and "unattractive", where work and community is very chill and by-the-numbers.

On the other hand you have very hot and competitive fields, that will attract a certain kind of people.

And plenty of toxic / abrasive scientists get to reign free, if it just happens that they're producing the desired results.

neilv• 2 years ago

If it helps to hear it, there definitely are amazing figures, including ones that not only do brilliant work, but are exceptionally great as fellow humans (especially humble, thoughtful, altruistic, etc.).

I don't have a complete perspective, but have heard from people at many universities. (Including from someone who'd made their way up one university, and remarked they weren't impressed by recent faculty hires there, "but I'd take a bullet for" a particular all-around great professor there.)

I think most academics are closer to the normal distributions of just people. Better educated (at least in a niche, and possibly generally) than your average person, and maybe smarter than average in some regards, but probably not a superhuman intelligence, and AFAICT not any more likely to be saintly than any other human.

There's also a lot of hustle required of many professors, so they have less time, energy, and power, for the benevolent and wise elder citizen of the university model society role, which I once imagined professors would tend to embrace.

There are also some more unfortunate dynamics going on, some places, and with some individuals especially. And there are facets of some universities that behave like maybe the most internally toxic corporation you can imagine -- except arguably worse, because the institution or individuals tend to be held less to account.

YWall39• 2 years ago

Asked a Spanish professor of computer science, and he said the system is so corrupt that nobody cares. Everybody knows about this guy, and nobody cares.

cess114• 2 years ago

Here's a short article with some more links about this person: https://forbetterscience.com/2024/05/03/schneider-shorts-3-0...

Citation- and papermills are quite common and can be quite lucrative. Elsevier, Springer and the others don't really have anything to gain from stopping it.

moltar• 2 years ago

SEO backlinks IRL

rc_kas• 2 years ago

The problem with building any system is that someone will always abuse it eventually.

perihelions• 2 years ago

This guy's antics were featured on Retraction Watch back in 2022 [0]. All of this apparently happened in plain sight—as illustrated by this (farcical, single-candidate) faculty vote getting 50% blank ballots–protest votes. Everyone there knew.

"How can we design algorithms to detect..." is the wrong question in response to this scandal—it's completely in the wrong category. IMHO! These citation cliques are unsubtle and basically trivial to detect. It's the professional work culture of research universities that's the hard, unsolved problem.

[0] https://retractionwatch.com/2022/03/25/how-critics-say-a-com... ("How critics say a computer scientist in Spain artificially boosted his Google Scholar metrics")

ajkjk3• 2 years ago

Yeah, the problem is not that nobody can see a solution. There are a million solutions. The problem is someone having or finding the power to implement them.

I think sometimes that people like algorithmic answers to problems because it is sort of replacement for actual power. If you can't imagine finding the power fix something that's bad yourself, at least you can contrive a logical structure that might fix it automatically.

A lot of technologists would, I think, have a much larger impact if they concerned themselves with finding political power instead.

aleph_minus_one2• 2 years ago

A lot of technologists would, I think, have a much larger impact if they concerned themselves with finding political power instead.

The problem is rather that many great programmers are "insanely bad politicians".

Programming is about working hard against all the resistance to do "the right thing", wheras politics is about "reading the room", not antagonizing important people, making phoney compromises, corrupting yourself, ...

So such programmers will hardly ever get the political power to change anything.

AlbertCory2• 2 years ago

Relevant to that : every month or so HN'ers rant about "patents and how we need to fix them." Ranting is all that ever happens. They're uninterested in what it would take to actually do that.

ambicapter2• 2 years ago

I mean, even with political power, you would still need to find an organization structure that doesn't long-term trend towards this sort of behavior. Solving that probably requires similar type of thinking to algorithmically solving problems, it's just a different system. Of course you couldn't implement it without political power, but it is required nonetheless.

EnigmaFlare• 2 years ago

A little step is to blame the students and other researchers who fraudulently cited his papers. They're part of the problem but often presented as victims.

throwaway982739• 2 years ago

Completely agree with your comment, and here you have some more examples in the Spanish university to support your thesis:

- Rafael Luque was suspended of employment for 13 years not because of blatant dishonesty but because he was signing with the King Abdulaziz University as first affiliation and that bothered his university [1]. The KAU is known for buying citations this way [2].

- Another example is Francisco Herrera Triguero [3]. He's been signing with KAU as second affiliation for years and nothing happened to him even when the story about the other guy broke out.

So yeah, maybe we don't need more algorithms but more public oversight over this stuff.

[1] (Spanish): https://elpais.com/ciencia/2023-03-31/suspendido-de-empleo-y...

[2] https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2014/10/31/to-some-a-citat...

[3] (Spanish): https://www.elsaltodiario.com/universidad/papers-y-mas-paper...

1oooqooq3• 2 years ago

when people talk about "algorithms" today is like taking about specialist in the 70s: they know they are doing something illegal/immoral but they won't stop and nobody can stop them. they just need a way to spin public perception.

in this case they wanted to keep on but putting out press release on how "they are leading the detection of the bad thing everyone knows they are doing"

just like bakman-fried mom is stanford board of ethics. lol.

j45• 2 years ago

This feels a little like named social media influencers.

I wonder if things like LLM's and/or knowledge graphs could research what the rest can't.

cbg0• 2 years ago

These guys were stupid enough to put it in writing, but this happens in lots of places where you either get quid pro quo citations or just get put on an article as an author even though you contributed nothing. Unless folks start getting hit with jail time for this stuff, it's unlikely to change.

jl2718• 2 years ago

Is there a reasonable case to be made for excluding citations entirely? They seem frivolous and arbitrary, and most of the genuine ones are discovered by search, so maybe we could publish without citations, and let the search be automated. The more useful element of a paper is the unique claims that it makes, and these probably should be denoted explicitly.

alpinisme• 2 years ago

One large motivation for looking at citations is as a proxy for the importance or value of your claims. More productive research claims will beget more productive research, whereas trivial or dead end or uninteresting claims will just float off into the archival void. So if you want to exclude citations you need another way to measure importance quickly and impersonally across entire fields in more or less real time.

syngrog66• 2 years ago

If you observe Hacker News long enough its easy to deduce there are upvote cartels (rings) operating. If a particular submitted link has the good fortune to be put onto the screens of the folks of one of these external rings it will reliably get the 100s of upvotes needed, and fast enough, for HN's algorithms to decide it merits being promoted to the HN front page. Once there its pure gravy in terms of eyeball flow and yet more upvotes.

I've certainly given up on ever hoping a link I favor makes it to the HN front page organically without relying on shady upvote eing tactics. HN has reached a point where the upvote cartels, in effect, rule.

Its cheating. A form of corruption. A dark pattern. I've considered resorting to using it myself, but have not (so far?) out of ethical disgust.

Der_Einzige3• 2 years ago

I’ve strongly considered writing scripts for other “HN dissenters” who want to show their displeasure by automatically mass upvoting all downvoted posts and automatically undeading posts. If even a tiny fraction of the N-gate former reader base used it, cyber subversives could serious muck up this place until dang and PG start to notice.

BirAdam2• 2 years ago

As humans, we often acknowledge our species’ failings in adhering to rigor and planned systems. Humans typically acknowledge that most lawyers and politicians are corrupt, and we often even admit this is due to various incentives that exist and push people in corrupt directions… yet, humans seem surprised or scandalized when this occurs in science, academia, medicine, religion, sports, or engineering. We are all just humans. In this case, the dude optimized for a metric that would elevate his own status. Is it wrong? Yeah. Should he be in charge of anything? No. Is he unique? No.

rendall2• 2 years ago

Are we finding it surprising because academia has changed, becoming more corrupt? Or was it always corrupt, but only now coming to light with more awareness? In any case, this is unsustainable. Our civilization relies on academe to help understand and navigate our world.

pas• 2 years ago

it was always corrupt, and we got here despite that corruption

academia ought not to be confused with scientific and technological progress

(it's enough to look at academia's roots, it did not start with pure meritocratic institutions to put it mildly.)

carlosjobim• 2 years ago

Most humans are of a much higher level than those who get involved in academia. We should be surprised if an admirable person has a history of academia, because any involvement is a taint on the soul.

snird• 2 years ago

Universities everywhere become corrupt, as performance doesn't matter for the staff to be paid.

The only thing that matters is political power, both for the hosting country subsidies as well as outside donations (Qatar massive donation that made Harvard president claim that a call to murder all Jews is ok is a great example).

I have no idea how to fix this at this point.

I just know that trust in academic institutions is very, very low. And justifiably so.

timkam2• 2 years ago

performance doesn't matter for the staff to be paid.

That's not the case for the people who are in the key phase of establishing themselves as academics and who are generally not on permanent contracts. And for tenured staff, performance decides access to resources that may be as mundane as one's own research time. Conversely, the problem is a mix of extremely shallow performance metrics and a paper-pusher system in which most people get bogged down by bureaucracy by the time they get tenure (or even earlier). This means that very few people have the peace of mind that allows them to focus on high-risk fundamental research. In European AI and CS, I would claim that the ones who manage to maintain focus essentially do this in their free time and get little reward for this; the alternative, i.e., building a strong franchise, is more rewarding in terms of performance metrics.

rokizero2• 2 years ago

is it me or is his google scholar page gone? i'm wondering if it's been removed by google or he removed it himself in an effort to remove 'evidence'

This used to link to his profile: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=j7syrnkAAAAJ&hl=en

rendall2• 2 years ago

It seems to have been removed some time in the last year: https://web.archive.org/web/20230701000000*/https://scholar....

rokizero2• 2 years ago

good find, thanks!

in case anyone's curious, these were his numbers as of may 2023

            All   Since 2018
  Citations 44715 22788
  h-index   117   72
  i10-index 725   461

(once more amazed how incredible useful archive.org is)

timkam2• 2 years ago

The Corchado issue is merely an extreme "black and white" case, whereas the overall problem is more nuanced. E.g., there is no clear line between an implicit citation cartel and a group of thought-leaders in a small community. And once you are a thought-leader in a small community, it's much easier to gain broader visibility, to obtain funding, and to influence behind-the-scenes decision making. In a way, Corchado is relatively harmless because everybody knows he is a clown. He does not have much to say in the European AI community. The real issues are in the grey areas (and the people thriving in them) that affect and taint everyone.

rulalala2• 2 years ago

Grey area? Entire disciplines and research areas (theoretical macroeconomics, string theory, ...) could be so.

elorant• 2 years ago

So basically that's an offline backlink scheme.

LeroyRaz• 2 years ago

I feel he was just unusually stupid enough to explicitly put in writing what many academics subtly and implicitly do. People cite their friends, others in the field (with an implicit quid pro quo), etc... even if the research cited has only a tenuous connection to the current paper.

The whole practice of citations is very strange. Many times, I have seen researchers search for works to cite at the time of writing! The top Google result gets cited, without the person having even read the paper before, as all they were looking for was a cite for a pretty generic claim (e.g., machine learning has been applied to health care). I'm not sure that such citations are even bad practice as statements should be evidenced by cites. But as a result, a paper getting cited (e.g., the top ranked Google search for ML and Cancer) doesn't actually mean that the cited paper truly means anything, is credible, or a meaningful scientific contribution.

readthenotes1• 2 years ago

No one else was willing to run against him. Another win for democracy!

robotelvis• 2 years ago

This kind of “political citation” happens even without intentional fraud.

When I was in grad school it was common knowledge that if you wanted to get papers accepted you needed to cite the people on the program committee and the likely reviewers - even if you didn’t think their work was particularly relevant to what you were doing.

Not as extreme as an explicit clique telling people they have to do it, but some of the distortions are similar - senior people are senior because they are widely cited, but you have to cite them because they are senior people.

1oooqooq3• 2 years ago

twelve wrongs don't make a right. even including reviewers as authors would automatically remove them from being reviewer....

why do you feel the need to normalize some dumb thing you were subjected to in the past?

nobodyandproud• 2 years ago

Crude? Yes, but the fault isn’t with Professor Juan Manuel Corchado.

If the most important metric is publishing and impact, measured via citation count, then the failure is institutional.

rulalala2• 2 years ago

Universities are rigged by internal politics. In this case the guy will be hit by external politics later than sooner, but this will set little precedent for exemplary behaviour.

o999• 2 years ago

No surprise

New head of one of the world’s oldest universities organized a citation cartel

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