2023-04-19 10:14:33
Seven researchers from highly cited Spanish institutions changed their main affiliation to a Saudi Arabian university in one year, in what seems like a quick and easy way for Arab centers to gain prestige and increase their position in international rankings.
This is revealed by the report ‘The affiliation game between Spanish and Saudi Higher Education and Research institutions’, carried out by the consultant Siris after the publication of an article in El País in which it reported that the chemist Rafael Luque had been suspended by the University of Córdoba from his employment and salary for the next thirteen years due to the incorrect scientific affiliation of his research production. ABC also spoke with this investigator, who attributed what happened to “envy.”
The paper, which analyzes Clarivate’s Highly Cited Researchers (HRC) list, which lists around 7,000 researchers, explains that, for universities, having highly cited researchers “is important because it is considered a mark of quality and increases their attractive”. Furthermore, this list is a “key indicator” of the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities.
In this sense, the research highlights that a single highly cited researcher can allow a university to gain up to 200 positions in the Shanghai Ranking.
In 2019, the Spanish researcher Rafael Luque indicated that the University of Córdoba was his secondary affiliation and placed King Saud University as his main affiliation. The Shanghai Ranking only takes into account the main affiliations.
Saudi Arabia, with 112 highly cited researchers, has a proportion between five and ten times higher of these researchers compared to Spain, Germany or France. According to Clarivate, 44 of these researchers are only associated with Saudi institutions through research grants and not main employment.
One of them is the chemist Rafael Luque, along with six other Spanish researchers. These 44 cases are distributed mainly between King Saud University and King Abdulaziz University, representing more than half of their affiliated highly cited researchers.
The report by Siris, which indicates that more than half of the highly cited researchers at King Saud University and King Abdulaziz University have affiliations only through a research grant, warns of the possibility that the real number “is still higher, since in 2021 only nine researchers with this type of affiliation to Saudi universities were listed.
Furthermore, among the 112 highly cited researchers from Saudi Arabia, it stands out that there is a “surprisingly high” number of eleven researchers who indicate Spanish institutions as secondary affiliations (second only to China, which appears as a secondary affiliation for 12 researchers).
“Being aware of these cases could help these institutions to investigate whether the affiliation details need to be corrected and thus ensure that credit is correctly attributed to the main employer of those researchers,” the report underlines.
Given these data, CSIC sources have informed Europa Press that the institution is studying it, although at the moment it cannot give a definitive answer in this regard, since they have found “inconsistencies” in some data that appear in Clarivate that need to be reviewed with more detail.
On the other hand, the same sources recall that the new Science and Innovation Law regulates double affiliation from September 2022 and the CSIC is analyzing the way in which it will be applied in the institution.
For their part, sources from the Ministry of Science and Innovation affirm that they are going to wait for the assessment of the CSIC Ethics Committee and, in case there is some type of irregularity, responsibilities will be cleared up.
In the same way, they ensure that the Government’s priority has always been to improve the quality of the scientific and university system as a whole and explain that these rankings accumulate a history of criticism of their validity due to the type of indicators they use and, therefore, , they recall, should not be taken as the only references when classifying the excellence of universities in the world.
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