For the second year running, the Dental College at the Saveetha Institute of Technical and Medical Sciences in Chennai, India, has topped the list of the most cited institutions in the world in its field, produced by UK-based media consultancy Quacquarelli Symonds (QS). Thanks to its high performance in this metric, it also appears in QS’s university ranking as the 13th best dental school in the world — just ahead of the University of São Paulo (USP), which is in 14th place. An investigation by the scientific integrity news website Retraction Watch indicates that the results are driven by a scheme that may amount to misconduct.
Every year, approximately 500 students at the institution participate in a four-hour exam during which they have to write a 1,500-word essay describing the research they carried out in the past year. The essays are revised by other students and professors, who add bibliographical references. They are then submitted to scientific journals and many are accepted for publication. These articles contribute to the remarkable performance of the college’s scientific output, which totaled 1,400 articles last year.
According to Retraction Watch, most of the references are to other works by people at the institution itself. One of the aims appears to be for the student articles to boost the impact of papers by their professors. The texts praise the work of research groups at the institution with generic phrases, such as “rich experience,” “extensive knowledge,” or “numerous original studies,” and then cite dozens of articles by professors at the college — many references are not even related to the subject of the paper in question. For example, a 2019 article describing a method for classifying human face shapes published in the Journal of Oral Biology and Craniofacial Research by two researchers from the institution has been cited 169 times, according to Google Scholar. All except four of the citations are from articles written by Saveetha authors.
The institution denies deliberately manipulating performance indicators, but people outside the university believe it is a calculated scheme. Theodore Eliades, a professor of orthodontics at the University of Zürich and editor in chief of The Korean Journal of Orthodontics, told the journal Science and Retraction Watch that the citations are meticulously inserted in the texts to deceive readers and to hide the fact that they are self-citations, a practice that is opposed in scientific communication.
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