Juan Manuel Corchado, a computer scientist at the University of Salamanca in Spain has the 145th-highest h-index in the country. But many of the nearly 39,000 citations are by him to his own work. It’s not clear why anyone would try to inflate their Google Scholar metrics in Spain, according to Alberto Martín-Martín, an information scientist and bibliometrician at the University of Granada in Spain. Research evaluation there still focuses heavily on the Journal Impact Factor, said Martín-Martín.
Martín-Martín said that by his calculations, just under 22% of Corchado’s citations are to his own papers that are listed on Google Scholar — around 8,400 out of nearly 39,000 citations. According to Martín-Martín’s analysis, more than 11,000 citations to Corchado’s work come from papers posted on ResearchGate, out of which 9,300 are from papers that are not available anywhere else.
Petr Heneberg of the Charles University in Prague, who has conducted research about citation manipulation, says he doesn’t see anything wrong in uploading one’s own abstracts or presentations to Google Scholar. What Heneberg found more surprising was Corchado’s publication record. He notes that although Corchado published a doable number of papers recently – 25 papers in 2021, for instance – his numbers were significantly higher before. For instance, in 2009, Corchado co-authored a striking 603 papers – most of them conference papers.
