Dozens of the world’s most cited scientists stop falsely claiming to work in Saudi Arabia

The great Saudi university farce is coming to an end. The number of highly cited scientists who claim to work in Saudi Arabia has plummeted by 76% since April last year, when EL PAÍS revealed the existence of a scheme in which foreign researchers were being paid up to €70,000 (nearly $74,000) a year to lie about their place of employment, in order to artificially pump up Saudi institutions in international academic rankings. The chemist Damià Barceló, for example, falsely declared from 2016 to 2022 that his primary affiliation was King Saud University in Riyadh, when in reality he was the director of the Catalan Institute for Water Research in Girona, in northeastern Spain.

In 2022, Saudi Arabia boasted 109 professors on the prestigious List of Highly Cited Researchers, compiled by the multinational Clarivate with the 7,000 researchers in the world whose studies are most cited by other colleagues. The more members of this list a university has, the higher it will appear in the Shanghai Ranking, the most influential ranking of world universities. Some Saudi institutions chose to bribe highly cited foreign scientists to lie in the Clarivate database, a trick that went unnoticed for years. Following the scandal uncovered by this newspaper, the number was reduced from 109 to 76 by the end of 2023. In the new list, published on November 19, only 26 remain, including the Spanish ecologists Carlos Duarte and Fernando Maestre, who did indeed move and work at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, in the Saudi town of Thuwal.

The List of Highly Cited Researchers had attracted all kinds of cheating in recent years, as some scientists got on the list using tricks such as citing themselves on an industrial scale, publishing insubstantial studies every week, or colluding with other researchers to cite each other. David Pendlebury, an analyst at Clarivate, explained in a statement that his company has tightened its filters this year, to “identify researchers and their co-authors involved in misconduct of many kinds,” especially those who manipulate citations of their work. Clarivate excluded only 300 scientists from its 2021 list for fraudulent practices. In 2022, there were 500. In 2023, a thousand. And this year, there has been a record of 2,000 exclusions: practically one in three apparently highly cited researchers has been caught engaging in bad practices.

Swiss analyst Yoran Beldengrün has revealed the global dimension of the Saudi deception. In just a decade, 210 highly cited scientists from other countries declared that their main place of work was a university in Saudi Arabia. Most of them were from China (44), Spain (19), the United States (16) and Turkey (14), according to a report by Beldengrün prepared for the specialized consultancy SIRIS Academic, based in Barcelona. For this analyst, the “huge drop” in the number of highly cited scientists who claim to work in Saudi Arabia is “a good step towards research integrity.”

The University of Córdoba, in southern Spain, suspended the chemist Rafael Luque without pay for 13 years after discovering that he had falsely declared that his main place of work was King Saud University. His case, revealed by EL PAÍS, was the most read news article in this newspaper in 2023, and it caused international astonishment. Because of this lie, the Córdoba institution fell about 150 spots in the Shanghai Ranking, dropping out of the top 800, according to calculations by SIRIS Academic. Nature magazine, a reference for world science, picked up on Luque’s case and the subsequent investigation of the Saudi fake affiliation scheme conducted by this newspaper. For the mathematician Domingo Docampo, who has been denouncing for years the tricks used to climb the academic rankings, this global repercussion has been crucial.

“It would appear that international coverage of bad practices in connection with academic affiliation, and the fact that top-level scientific journals have picked up on it and commented, is bearing fruit,” says Docampo, who was rector of the University of Vigo, in northwestern Spain. “It seems that Clarivate has taken note and includes this behavior, together with the high levels of self-citations, suspicions of collusion (cartels) and the cases reported by Retraction Watch [a U.S. organization specialising in scientific fraud],” adds the mathematician.

The disappearance of the fake Saudi professors is a blow to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is considered by the United States to be responsible for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Bin Salman has set a goal of having at least five Saudi universities among the top 200 in the world by 2030. Without this trick, his institutions will collapse in the rankings. King Saud University, falsely declared the primary affiliation of Spanish chemists Damià Barceló and Rafael Luque, has gone from boasting 38 highly cited scientists to having just a dozen in one year.

King Abdulaziz University, in the Saudi city of Jeddah, was one of the most active institutions in recruiting Spanish researchers willing to lie, partly thanks to the mathematician Juan Luis García Guirao, a professor at the Polytechnic University of Cartagena who acted as an intermediary between the university and at least a dozen national scientists, according to the EL PAÍS investigation. King Abdulaziz University claimed to have 12 highly cited researchers last year. The new list does not include any.

The proportion of highly cited researchers in Saudi Arabia — almost one in 200 professors — was so high that it was five or even 10 times higher than the percentages observed in Germany, Spain and France, according to data from SIRIS Academic. Another of the Saudi institutions involved was the University of Taif, an hour’s drive from Mecca. The food technologist Francisco Tomás Barberán declared that he worked there in 2020, although in reality he was doing research at the Segura Center for Soil Science and Applied Biology, in the eastern Spanish region of Murcia. The Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), which oversees the center, opened disciplinary proceedings a year ago against five members involved in the Saudi plot to boost its university rankings.

The 2024 List of Highly Cited Researchers includes some 6,600 individuals, 36% of them from the United States, compared to 43% in 2018. This loss of American representation is explained by the growth of China, which has gone from 8% in 2018 to 20% today. The Chinese Academy of Sciences, which includes more than 100 institutes, is the world organization with the greatest number of highly cited researchers, reaching a total of 308. The American universities of Harvard (231) and Stanford (133) occupy the second and third places. Spain was in 2021 the ninth country in the world with the most scientists on this list, with 1.7%, but now occupies the 13th spot with 1.5% (99).

Clarivate analyst David Pendlebury explains that his team has introduced new filters after detecting “citation exchanges” between researchers, who agree to cite each other in order to climb the rankings. In October, the publisher Springer Nature suddenly withdrew 75 studies by Juan Manuel Corchado, rector of the University of Salamanca, and his collaborators for this type of fraudulent practice.

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