The University of Salamanca (USAL), the oldest higher education institution in Spain and the fourth to be founded in Europe, is experiencing an embarrassing chapter in its 806-year history. The current dean of the university, computer scientist Juan Manuel Corchado, 53, is embroiled in a misconduct scandal that includes fabrication of article citations, manipulation of the peer-review process, and inflation of academic performance.
In October, publisher Springer Nature announced the retraction of 75 papers connected to Corchado’s research group due to “unusual citation behavior” and signs that the peer-review process had been compromised. Fourteen of the retracted articles were written by the dean himself. All the retractions are of conference papers (summaries of presentations made at scientific conferences) that made 1,772 citations of papers by the USAL dean and 559 of articles from the Advances in Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence Journal (ADCAIJ), of which he is an editor in chief. In one of the retracted papers, Corchado cited 200 of his other articles.
Chris Graf, director of research integrity at Springer Nature, told the journal Science that “professional or personal connections” interfered with the editorial review of the retracted papers. According to Graf, the peer-review process appears to have been manipulated, since many of the papers were presented at conferences organized by Corchado’s research group, BISITE (bioinformatics, intelligent systems, and educational technology). The dean did not respond to Science’s request for a comment on the retractions, but a spokesperson for his group stated that the retracted papers represent a small portion of Corchado’s academic work and that the accusations are “malicious and solely aimed at discrediting the research group.”
Juan Manuel Corchado, who is also a professor at USAL and specializes in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, is one of the most prolific researchers in Spain. He has published more than 1,000 scientific articles, and in 2018 he was named on a list of the most productive scientists in the world, compiled by American researcher John Ioannidis of Stanford University, USA—that year, Corchado published one paper every six days. In total, he published 62 articles, 33 of which were in journals and 29 of which were in conference proceedings.
The first suggestions that something was wrong with his work emerged in 2022, when the website Retraction Watch reported that of the remarkable 39,000 citations his scientific papers had received according to Google Scholar, 8,400 were self-citations: Corchado had a habit of filling his bibliographies with references to his own previous papers. This practice is permitted when an author’s previous work is essential to explain new results. Abusing self-citations is considered misconduct, since it inflates academic performance indicators that might be used as criteria for funding decisions and promotions.
The report, which was based on an analysis by bibliometrics expert Alberto Martín-Martín of the University of Granada, also revealed other anomalous patterns. A large number of citations were made in scientific texts stored on ResearchGate, on the profiles of researchers whose identities could not be verified. Other papers were only available in the University of Salamanca’s own repository. This type of article is not included in indicators produced by databases such as the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science and Elsevier’s Scopus, which only consider papers from certified, peer-reviewed scientific journals. But they are included by Google Scholar metrics, which exhaustively tracks academic literature online, wherever it may be found (see Pesquisa FAPESP issue nº 343).
At the time, Corchado defended himself by saying that the papers in the USAL repository were only meant for discussion. He accused detractors of creating fake profiles on ResearchGate to damage his reputation and argued that Google Scholar indicators are not used to evaluate researchers in Spain, so he would not benefit from its metrics.
The case returned to the spotlight at the beginning of the year when Corchado, despite facing questions about the integrity of his academic work, decided to run for dean of USAL, a position for which there were no other applicants. He was appointed to the role in May. The following month, the Spanish Research Ethics Committee called for an independent investigation into the allegations against the computer scientist, the results of which were released in September. The report, commissioned by two researchers from the University of Granada—Emilio Delgado López-Cózar and Alberto Martín-Martín—stated that Corchado and his colleagues used “questionable publishing practices” to “massively and irregularly” cite the group’s own work. A clear overlap was found in the bibliographies of 36 conference papers, which shared more than 30 identical references. The newspaper El País reported that Corchado’s colleagues were instructed by email to choose 20 articles written by the dean and 10 articles from the ADCAIJ to cite in their papers.
“I have never seen a case like this,” Ismael Ràfols, a bibliometrician at Leiden University, Netherlands, told Science. Ràfols believes that Corchado was not trying to manipulate indicators to gain an advantage on metrics, but rather to promote himself. “This is more the behavior of somebody who wants to be the star in a field and wants to have huge visibility,” he said. October’s retractions had repercussions across the Spanish scientific community. The Governing Board of the Conference of Deans of Spanish Universities published a statement, not mentioning the head of the USAL by name, expressing regret that recent reports of misconduct and retractions “damage the international reputation of science in our country, and may cast doubt on society’s confidence in the work of science.”
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