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New head of one of the world’s oldest universities organized a citation cartel

For years, Professor Juan Manuel Corchado demanded that his collaborators include up to 20 references to his own work in their papers. On Friday he took office as the new rector of Salamanca University in Spain

Three years ago, Juan Manuel Corchado boasted of being the fourth best scientist in Spain and one of the 250 best on the planet in the field of computing, but he achieved this brilliant rise in the rankings by cheating on an industrial scale. He published documents full of self-citations in the scientific repository of the University of Salamanca, so that they would be indexed by the Google Scholar search engine, which in turn feeds rankings such as Guide2Research, in which Corchado was close to the top position at the national level. After EL PAÍS began publishing news stories about his practices in March, the Spanish Research Ethics Committee opened an investigation into Corchado, as announced on Friday, May 17, by the Ministry of Science.

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