The rector of the University of Salamanca (USal), Spain’s oldest and one of its most prestigious institutions, is under fire for allegedly engineering vast numbers of citations to his own work. Among the papers under suspicion are dozens of conference papers in Springer Nature publications.
The papers collectively contain hundreds of citations to work by computer scientist Juan Manuel Corchado, who was appointed rector of USal in May. Most were written by researchers at USal, and almost all were from conferences his own group organized, according to the analysis, published on Monday by University of Granada bibliometricians Alberto Martín Martín and Emilio Delgado López-Cózar.
Corchado’s alleged gaming of citation metrics is “absolutely insane,” says bibliometrician Domingo Docampo, ex-rector of the University of Vigo, who was not involved in the investigation. “I am 100% convinced that the evidence is pointing to misconduct,” he says. “And now it’s the reckoning.”
In a public statement on Thursday, Corchado calls the allegations a “smear campaign” that “does not seek to preserve ethics and integrity in science, but has the ultimate goal of forcing my resignation as rector,” and says the report “is biased and contains all sorts of errors.” In additional statements to Science, a representative from Corchado’s group says the Spanish Committee on Research Ethics (CEEI), a government advisory body that requested the investigation, “has never contacted Prof. Corchado although he has offered to speak to the committee from the beginning.”
Doubts about Corchado’s citations first emerged in Retraction Watch, which in 2022 noted that nearly 22% of his citations were to his own work. Then in March, after Corchado announced his intention to stand for election as rector, the Spanish newspaper El País picked up the case. It reported that Corchado had cited himself excessively in documents posted to the university’s repository and on allegedly fake profiles on the social network ResearchGate, in one case including 100 references to past work in a four-paragraph paper. Because Google Scholar indexed these documents, they resulted in a dramatically inflated citation count on Corchado’s profile.
Corchado told El País a former colleague had created the fake profiles to prove that ResearchGate produced misleading bibliometric results; his research group says a police investigation is underway and Corchado has filed complaints for impersonation. In a statement posted to his website in April, Corchado wrote that the papers on the university repository were “working papers” used in sessions with students, and that he had no reason to inflate his Google Scholar metrics as they are not widely used to seriously judge a scientist’s quality.
Earlier this month, USal released a report that exculpated him, concluding that his citation metrics were within a normal range. But CEEI—which had requested the report—slammed it as superficial and “a missed opportunity to clarify this situation,” declining to accept its conclusions and calling for an exhaustive and impartial investigation.
In May, after El País published its reports, the committee asked Martín Martín—who had shared findings with the paper—and Delgado López-Cózar to investigate further. Their findings now suggest Corchado inflated his metrics not only in Google Scholar, but also in Scopus, which is much more important for the assessment of a researcher’s impact.
The pair examined 11,384 documents that Scopus reported as citing Corchado’s work, finding nearly 20% of the citations came from papers presented at just 30 conferences. In 31 of the 50 documents that cited Corchado the most, 70% of the references were to Corchado or the journal he edits, the Advances in Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence Journal (ADCAIJ). In six papers, more than 90% of the references were to Corchado or his journal. The vast majority of these 50 papers were in conference proceedings published by Springer Nature.
In 36 conference papers, Martín Martín and Delgado López-Cózar found considerable overlap in the reference lists, with many papers—across different conferences—sharing more than 30 identical references. They conclude the results show “significant and systematic manipulation” and lend credibility to reports in El País that emails to Corchado’s collaborators instructed them to choose 20 Corchado papers and 10 ADCAIJ papers from a list to cite in their work.
Last week, Corchado told a local publication, Salamancahoy, that the case is a “past issue.” However, the saga is likely to continue: Springer Nature emailed “at least a dozen” of Corchado’s co-authors on 5 September alerting them that their work will soon be retracted, according to El País. It’s unclear how many papers will be retracted and whether they include those highlighted by Martín Martín and Delgado López-Cózar; Springer Nature declined to comment. In his statement, Corchado says his group had identified “editing errors” in several papers and was working with Springer Nature to correct them, but that the publisher had “suddenly decided to eliminate” them, which he disagrees with.
“I have never seen a case like this,” says Ismael Ràfols, a bibliometrician at Leiden University. University and national evaluations—in Spain and more widely—are intensely focused on research metrics, which can encourage misconduct. But Ràfols thinks Corchado wasn’t simply trying to game these evaluations. “This is more the behavior of somebody who wants to be the star in a field and wants to have huge visibility,” he says. “I suppose this is like people driving a red BMW and showing off status.”
Corchado ran unopposed for rector, but the allegations were already swirling. José María Díaz Mínguez, a geneticist at USal who served as vice president under the previous rector, urged students and staff to spoil their votes in protest. If Corchado does not resign, it’s not clear there is any recourse, Díaz Mínguez says: All the relevant disciplinary procedures “must be carried out under the ruling of the rector.” And although the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities could potentially intervene, that would threaten the autonomy of not just USal, but all Spanish universities. Either way, he says, “I think it’s a terrible thing for the university.”
