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Professor Juan Manuel Corchado wants to occupy the legendary throne of the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno: that of rector of the University of Salamanca.
Corchado, specialized in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, is one of the scientists with the greatest impact in the world, according to Google Scholar data.
His figures are overwhelming: more than 45,000 mentions of his work.
The shocking thing is that many of these mentions come from himself.
In a document on covid signed only by him, he writes four insubstantial paragraphs and includes a hundred citations to his previous works, which have nothing to do with the coronavirus: studies on oil spills, tourism, financial forecasts and even levels of carbon dioxide in the ocean.
Corchado, born 52 years ago in Salamanca, denies in a telephone interview with EL PAÍS that he is cheating to artificially inflate his real scientific impact.
In recent years, he has uploaded a multitude of very short texts to the Internet accompanied by an enormous number of quotes from himself.
As he uploads them to his university's scientific repository, the Google Scholar search engine records them and takes them into account to develop its indicators.
With 45,000 mentions of him, Corchado apparently has more impact than the great world references in his field.
Israeli engineer Sarit Kraus, the latest winner of the excellence award at the prestigious international IJCAI conference, has 29,000 citations.
Scientist Milind Tambe, an expert in artificial intelligence at Google and Harvard University (USA), has 38,000.
Fragments of a four-paragraph document on covid with a hundred self-citations, uploaded by Juan Manuel Corchado to the scientific repository of the University of Salamanca.
An anonymous whistleblower informed EL PAÍS of Corchado's strange practices on April 21, 2023, after this newspaper uncovered the participation of Spanish scientists in a Saudi plot to rig the
ranking
of universities.
The informant insisted on March 8, after Corchado announced his intention to run for rector of the University of Salamanca, following the unexpected resignation of the person in charge.
This newspaper then verified the existence of the short documents full of self-citations and also confirmed that at least three apparently invented scientists—Juan Rodríguez, A. Pérez and Marcus Ress—inflated the mentions of Corchado with similar pseudostudies posted in the ResearchGate repository, another of the usual Google Scholar sources.
This newspaper began asking questions around the professor on March 12 and the controversial documents immediately began to disappear from the internet.
More information
The list of the most cited scientists in the world excludes more than 1,000 for fraud
Corchado's explanations are confusing.
He states that the four paragraphs with a hundred self-citations, and many other similar texts, were exercises to teach his students how to write a scientific study, but he does not specify what courses these were.
The documents analyzed by this newspaper are rather an example of how not to write a study: banal information with a multitude of self-citations unrelated to the topic.
Corchado knew that these writings artificially inflated his Google Scholar resume.
The American organization Retraction Watch, specialized in scientific fraud, revealed the professor's practices in March 2022, but Corchado maintained his behavior.
“They were documents that I made for my students, they were there and I hadn't even worried about them, to be honest,” he maintains now.
The aspiring rector says that he did not create the false profiles dedicated to compulsively citing his studies.
He claims that he was a former collaborator.
“He was a person we had here and he did very strange things.
He basically insisted on proving that ResearchGate was a network that didn't work and that the dating thing was a story.
“He started creating profiles of people, to do harm,” he says.
Corchado assures that he and his team have just deleted those profiles of non-existent researchers.
—How could you delete the fake ResearchGate profiles if you were not their creators and did not have the key?
—Well, because I am dedicated to cybersecurity.
—And why yesterday?
—It wasn't yesterday, it was this morning [March 13], when they told me that we can now delete them.
Basically, because for a week we have been trying to review everything I have published, because I am going to run for president in the elections.
The mathematician Domingo Docampo, former rector of the University of Vigo, has been denouncing the existence of “citation farms” for years: networks of cheating scientists who agree to cite each other to artificially rise in international
rankings
.
“It is well known that there are researchers who use despicable procedures to artificially increase the visibility of their scientific contributions,” he laments.
“The way to circumvent the good faith of services like Google Scholar is to store in institutional repositories banal reports full of scientific citations to the work of one or more researchers, without any relevance,” he explains.
Docampo details that it is very easy to detect this type of traps.
Other common databases, such as the Web of Science or Scopus, do not include any apparently academic document uploaded to an institutional repository.
A scientist should have a more or less similar number of citations on all these platforms.
“Increases above 500% are indicative of irregular behavior: it is the cotton test,” says the mathematician.
Juan Manuel Corchado has 8,700 citations in the Web of Science, compared to 45,000 in Google Scholar: five times more.
Profile of Juan Manuel Corchado on Google Scholar, inaccessible since March 12.
Ramon López de Mántaras, 71 years old, founded the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute in Cerdanyola del Vallès (Barcelona) three decades ago.
He was a pioneer in the discipline in 1975, and since then he has won many awards, including the most prestigious in Spain (such as the National Research Award), Europe (from the EurAI association) and the United States (from the organization IJCAI).
López de Mántaras has 10,000 citations, according to Google Scholar.
“It's okay to cite your previous work, but it has to be done with common sense and, above all, justified.
That's normal.
What is not normal is that most of your quotes are self-cites.
And what makes no sense at all is that the topic of the article has nothing to do with the list of references that you put at the end,” he points out.
Juan Manuel Corchado directs the BISITE research group, with more than 200 members, including his brother Emilio, a frequent co-author of his studies.
The team moves millions of euros every year.
Corchado himself traveled to the United Arab Emirates in November to present a “project to create a large digital twin that models the digital economy, tokenization [converting sensitive data into encrypted formats] and digital currencies worldwide,” with initial financing. of two million.
In addition, he is responsible for seven different master's degrees at the University of Salamanca, has collaborated with the European Police Office (Europol) on terrorist detection methods on Twitter and is a member of the technical commission of the Wine Technology Platform, among many others. varied activities.
The Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) updates the
ranking
of Spanish researchers in Google Scholar every year, with more than 123,000 scientists.
Professor Juan Manuel Corchado appears in position 157. The local press of Salamanca usually celebrates this position of the Salamancan in the scientific elite.
Biologist Isidro Aguillo, editor of the
ranking
and head of the CSIC Cybermetrics Laboratory, explains that it is absolutely unusual for a researcher to upload short documents full of self-citations to institutional repositories.
Aguillo asks for sanctions for cheaters.
“My concern is impunity,” says the expert, from the Institute of Policies and Public Goods, in Madrid.
The president of the ethics committee of the University of Salamanca, science historian Bertha Gutiérrez, affirms that she has not received any complaints about Corchado's practices in the year she has been in office.
Gutiérrez herself was part of the previous candidacy for rector of Corchado, in 2017, when he was defeated.
The historian was going to be one of his vice-rectors.
It is not yet known if he will repeat the new candidacy.
The situation at the University of Salamanca is unusual: after the unexpected resignation of the rector, Ricardo Rivero, on March 7, a week later his provisional replacement, María José Rodríguez Conde, resigned by surprise.
Both alleged “personal reasons.”
My concern is impunity
Isidro Aguillo, head of the CSIC Cybermetrics Laboratory
Alberto Martín, expert in the Google Scholar tool, analyzed the case of Juan Manuel Corchado in 2022 at the request of the Retraction Watch organization.
“The results showed manipulation.
He had a fairly high self-citation rate and many citations came from papers only available on ResearchGate, where anyone can upload anything.
The authors seemed to be people who do not really exist or, at least, we could not find more information about them,” recalls the researcher, from the University of Granada.
According to his analysis, around half of the citations received by Corchado on Google Scholar were self-citations or came from suspicious documents.
Martín has tried to update his analysis, at the request of EL PAÍS, but on March 12, Corchado's controversial documents were disappearing from the internet as he read them.
“In an academic repository, someone who deposits documents cannot delete them.
This would go against the academic record, because those documents, in theory, could have been cited and, if they are deleted after the fact, the new knowledge that would have been generated from them is left without a basis,” he warns.
In addition to deleting these articles, Corchado has deactivated his Google Scholar profile.
The last time this newspaper was able to access it was on March 12.
Corchado insists that he has no need to cheat on Google Scholar.
The researcher also appears in the
ranking
of most cited scientists prepared by Stanford University (USA), which uses information from another database, Scopus, focused on authentic scientific journals.
Corchado is highly cited in part because he is hyperprolific: he has 750 papers in Scopus, with some 12,000 citations.
He has posted more than once a week for years.
On Google Scholar, his activity is even more enormous: 2,100 documents and 45,000 citations.
That extra production is riddled with self-citations.
The Google Scholar profile is barely taken into account in the formal evaluation processes of scientists in Spain, but when a researcher's name is entered in Google it is usually the first thing that appears, according to Alberto Martín.
“Overwhelming indicators like those shown in his [Corchado's] profile can contribute to generating an image of excellence, which can then lead to some benefit, such as invitations and requests for collaboration,” he emphasizes.
“In addition,
rankings
such as the one prepared by the CSIC with data from Google Scholar are usually used by local media, every time they are updated, to exalt the excellence of researchers who appear well in the photo.
This can contribute to building their political power,” he believes.
Do you have more information about this case or other similar ones?
You can write to us at
mansede@elpais.es
.
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