Eleven studies by Spanish scientist Rafael Luque are retracted due to fraudulent practices
A new tool reveals the alleged cheating committed for years by the chemist, who was recently honored at the Kremlin

The Spanish chemist Rafael Luque, 46, strode briskly onto the stage of the State Kremlin Palace in Moscow three months ago. In the official video, he appears ecstatic. He was about to receive a tribute for being one of the most frequently cited scientists in the world and having contributed, through his work, to the meteoric rise of the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia in the rankings of the world’s top academic institutions.
The gala — a show with dancers and even a military choir — was reminiscent of Luque’s glory days back home, when he was receiving applause in the Spanish media and winning international awards. Back then, he seemed like a world authority, but the truth is that he was simply flouting the rules of the system using the same crude strategy that thousands of other researchers around the world were simultaneously implementing.
On December 1, 2022, Luque was expelled from his university, Universidad de Córdoba, with a historic sanction. A new tool now exposes how he rose to the top and how he fell, eventually becoming honored in the Kremlin as “pro-Russian.” Eleven studies of his have already been retracted for fraudulent practices.
Luque, born in the Andalusian city of Córdoba, is suspiciously prolific. He published a study every two working days in 2022. Then he actually accelerated his pace in December of that year, when the artificial intelligence language generation program ChatGPT was released. “These months have been quite productive, because the truth is that articles that used to take me two or three days to complete are now done in one day,” he acknowledged in a video call with EL PAÍS in March 2023, from a kitschy hotel in Dhahran, the headquarters of the Saudi oil industry. This newspaper has tried to speak with him again over the last month, but received no response. Luque’s work is focused on the so-called green chemistry, which attempts to synthesize products, such as pharmaceuticals and fuels, while generating less waste.
Publishing insubstantial studies like hotcakes is one of the tricks used to climb the academic rankings. An analysis by U.S. statistician John Ioannidis last year identified some 3,200 scientists — 23 of them in Spain, including Luque — who publish more than 60 papers annually: at least one every five days. The number of hyperprolific researchers has increased most notably in three countries: Thailand (up nineteenfold in seven years), Saudi Arabia (up elevenfold), and Spain (up elevenfold). They also increased significantly in India (up tenfold), Russia (up sixfold), and Pakistan (up sixfold). Precisely in these countries, Luque wove a gigantic network of hundreds of collaborators, which facilitated his publication of ever more studies, which in turn were highly cited by those same colleagues. Thus, in 2018, he entered the prestigious List of Highly Cited Researchers, compiled by the multinational Clarivate.
The Spaniard is on his way to becoming one of the world’s researchers with the most studies retracted for fraudulent practices, according to data from Argos, a new tool for monitoring scientific integrity. His first work to be removed was an article on the synthesis of chemical compounds with supposed medical applications, which he co-authored with three researchers from Pakistan, two from China, and three from Saudi Arabia.
The publisher Wiley, after noting the “systematic manipulation” of the results, withdrew it on July 19, 2023. In October 2024 another publishing house, Elsevier, retracted four of his studies in one go after discovering “suspicious changes” in the authors’ names, which suddenly included the addition of Chinese, Korean, Pakistani and Taiwanese scientists — a common practice when authorship is sold to the highest bidder for a few hundred dollars, to pad their resumes without actually doing anything. His eleventh retraction took place three months ago, just days before his tribute at the Kremlin. It was a paper on chemical reaction catalysts, led by an Iranian scientist. Elsevier removed it after detecting “data manipulation.”
The Argos tool analyzes 57 million scientific studies every day in search of evidence of fraudulent practices. It was designed by Scitility, a public-benefit corporation created a year ago by Spanish computer scientist Antonio José Molina, his Dutch colleague Jan-Erik de Boer, and U.S. mathematician Gary Cornell. Massive data analysis uncovers suspicious patterns. In the case of Rafael Luque, they are completely abnormal. They even suggest the existence of an international network of scientists dedicated to inflating their own prestige through cheating, thus falsifying the rankings of the world’s top universities.
Molina, a 40-year-old from Seville, presents the chemist’s striking figures at the request of EL PAÍS. Having a study retracted, he emphasizes, is unusual. Of the more than 100 million scientists analyzed worldwide, 99.8% have not had a single work retracted. Rafael Luque has published at least 744 articles in just over a decade. With his 11 studies eliminated by publishers, he is already “in the top 0.1% of the most retracted authors of all time,” according to Molina. The computer scientist highlights Luque’s unusual associations. It’s difficult to find a retracted scientist, but the Spanish chemist has collaborated with 198 of them.
Some cases are scandalous. He has co-signed eight studies with Ashok Pandey, an Indian chemist who has already had 43 papers withdrawn. He has also been a co-author with the Indian engineer Pravin P. Patil (23 retractions), the Iraqi Mohammad Sajadi (20), the Pakistani Shafaqat Ali (11), the Iranian Pouya Ghamari Kargar (nine), the Russian Dmitry Olegovich Bokov (nine), the Finnish academic Mika Sillanpää (six), the Chinese researcher Wanxi Peng (five) and the Vietnamese researcher Anh Tuan Hoang (five).
“Rafael Luque has signed studies with 12 scientists who are in the top 1% of the most retracted authors of all time,” warns Molina. These toxic collaborations lead the Argos tool to calculate that the chemist from Córdoba has another 96 studies at high risk of being withdrawn and 335 at medium risk. These figures rival those of the rector of the University of Salamanca, Juan Manuel Corchado, and his colleagues, who saw 75 studies retracted due to fraudulent practices.
The driving force behind the cheating is money. Some academic institutions compete to recruit the most highly cited scientists, because having them on their payroll adds many points to the rankings of the world’s top universities. An investigation by EL PAÍS two years ago revealed that Saudi universities offered bribes of up to €70,000 ($79,900) annually in personal bank accounts to get these professors to lie about their workplace affiliations — in Clarivate’s internal database of the Highly Cited Researchers List — and falsely appear as Saudis. Two dozen Spanish researchers participated in this scheme.
Rafael Luque was one of them, although he claims he never took the €70,000 annual salary. Starting in 2019, he changed his personal information, first listing himself as a researcher at King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, behind the back of the public institution that was paying his civil servant’s salary, the University of Córdoba — which without him dropped around 150 places in the Shanghai ranking. In the only conversation he had with this newspaper, the chemist did admit that they paid for his luxury hotels and first-class travel. The University of Córdoba, after discovering its professor’s activities and not believing his explanations, expelled Luque on December 1, 2022, with a 13-year suspension from employment and pay.
An analysis by the Argos tool reveals that the Spanish chemist’s signature has been highly valued on the international market. In 342 of his studies, he appears as a researcher at the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia. In 113, he appears at the ECOTEC University in the Ecuadorian city of Samborondón. In 18, he appears at the Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry in China. In 11, he appears at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest in Romania. In 10, he appears at King Saud University in Saudi Arabia. And in a multitude of other studies, his signature appears in 16 different countries.
At the Kremlin gala, the master of ceremonies announced the Spanish chemist as a researcher at Ecuador’s ECOTEC. The Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia published a press release about the tribute on February 12, presenting Luque as the victim of a dismissal because he “openly disseminates a pro-Russian stance.” The statement highlighted that Luque’s collaboration had led the Russian institution to reach 23rd place in the QS world ranking, another one of the regular rankings. The Kremlin tribute went unnoticed until the journalist Dalmeet Singh Chawla published the news in the journal of the American Chemical Society a couple of weeks ago. That same society awarded Luque a distinction in 2018.
Argos’ founder, Antonio José Molina, acknowledges his frustration with the impunity enjoyed by scientists caught engaging in fraudulent practices. His tool now offers a dashboard that allows interested institutions to track their researchers’ “risky activities,” such as establishing new collaborations with scientists with a shady track record.
The Argos analysis shows that Luque reduced his suspicious studies when EL PAÍS exposed his case in March 2023. It was the newspaper’s most-read story of the year, and the scandal led to a tightening of Clarivate’s criteria, which, in the past year, excluded 2,000 researchers from the List of Highly Cited Researchers due to malpractice.
Luque defended another version of events. “In this world, if you stand out, you’re always going to have haters, envious people who are mediocre,” he said during the video call from a luxury hotel in Saudi Arabia. “A friend and professor of mine from India told me a story that I like to paraphrase because I feel quite represented by it. When an elephant walks through the jungle, there are many dangers: tigers, lions, wild dogs. These types of animals try to bite the elephant’s legs to kill it, but the elephant is wise and continues on its way.”
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