In just one year, the number of researchers linked to institutions in Saudi Arabia who were named on Clarivate’s Highly Cited Researchers list fell from 109 to 76. The purge was attributed to allegations that Saudi universities were attempting to inflate their position on international university rankings by falsely claiming to have hired dozens of highly cited foreign researchers. The practice is not new. In 2011, the journal Science showed that universities in the Middle Eastern country paid renowned scientists from Europe and the USA to name them as their second affiliation based on a commitment to visit the institutions for a few days each year. Shanghai Jiao Tong University, which produces the renowned Academic Ranking of World Universities, stopped considering secondary affiliations after the fraudulent method became known. To get around the changes, researchers began reporting Saudi institutions as their primary affiliation and their actual place of employment as their secondary affiliation.
The scam was recently revealed by the Spanish newspaper El País, which showed that several scientists from Spain were involved. One was Rafael Luque Alvarez de Sotomayor, a chemist who was fired from the University of Córdoba because he was also affiliated with King Saud University in the Saudi capital of Riyadh and RUDN University in Moscow, Russia, despite working full-time at the Spanish institution (see Pesquisa FAPESP issue nº 327). This year, Clarivate Analytics removed some 1,000 researchers from its Highly Cited Researchers list due to fraud.
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