Sing the Juan Manuel Corchado Song!

The rector of the University of Salamanca has been, since 2017, picking up – at remarkable speed – citations to his work:

 Corchado’s resume was “artificially” embellished starting in 2017, when he lost the election for rector of the University of Salamanca on his first attempt. At that time, the already veteran professor of computer science and artificial intelligence had just 4,750 citations, a number that suddenly jumped to 15,000 in 2018, then to almost 31,000 in 2020, and 44,000 by March 2024…

How’d he do it?

Twas not the work of a day. Various complex schemes, combined with simple threats and bribes (or so it appears; it’s not easy to figure out exactly how he got everyone he knew to throw his name repeatedly into any piece of research they cooked up), achieved his rector-winning outcome.

Corchado gave instructions to his employees to add dozens of citations to himself in their studies over a period of years. 

“Gave” is nice. Given that they were his utterly beholden underlings, maybe “told” or “ordered” or “commanded” would be better?

The Ethics Committee of the Spanish National Research Council, an independent body created by the government and Spain’s autonomous regions, urged the University of Salamanca on June 11 to exercise “its powers of inspection and sanction” in view of “the alleged seriousness” of the practices of its rector. The response of the Salamanca institution was to commission a report from the historian Salvador Rus Rufino, an old acquaintance of Corchado who had even defended the rector in public. On September 9, Rus Rufino presented a superficial and exculpatory analysis, which was unanimously rejected by the 11 members of the committee…

LOLOLOLOLOLOL.

 [The] rector [is not only] accused of “systematic manipulation” of his credentials, but also [of] those bad practices having spread to other university bodies such as Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca and the Library Service, ultimately responsible for the deletion of some 200 documents. 

Oh, did I mention he also got his slaves to delete incriminating docs? And…

… Corchado has deleted the texts from his blog, in which he boasted of being the fourth-best scientist in Spain and one of the 250 best in the world in the field of computing.

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UD thanks Elizabeth.

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More UD posts on citation cartels are here, here, here, and here.

I have access only to the headline, but that says it all – Oregon State U, after an unconscionably long time, has finally rid itself of galloping fakeroo Qwo-Li Driskill, outed by actual Native Americans, and by the students he reportedly bullies and demeans.

How do you think he kept all that money coming in?

12News asked [Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom] Horne on Thursday whether he believes [Bridget] O’Brien should be disqualified as an authorized vendor, given her history of alleged Medicaid fraud, nonpayment of contractors, dog-napping, and alleged SBA loan fraud.

“Ms. O’Brien is entitled to her day in court,” Horne said in a written statement.

UD has taken a break from MSNBC. Used to watch it all the time. Can’t anymore. I hope that will change.

The comment is from Andrew Sullivan.

They’re putting them in jail.

Far right Christian fanatic Dinesh D’Souza made a whole film that followed evil ballot-stuffers around the country as they stole the election from Jesus H. Trump.

Now that its claims turn out to be bullshit, D’Souza can’t be found, even by the New York Times.

His producer, under humongously expensive legal pressure from defamed non-stuffers, has issued a desperate apology, but D’Souza – an avid and lunatic conspiracy theorist – stands his ground.

The defamation cases won’t yield the way-whopping settlement Dominion Voting Systems got ($787 mill), but I’m sure they’ll do well.

Will this remarkable, all-encompassing fraud ever get the boot from Oregon State?

[C]itations matter the most, and if you look at the ranking systems, it’s all right there. The Times Higher Education world-university rankings, U.S. News — look at whichever you want, and somewhere between like 30 percent and 60 percent of those rankings are based on citations. Citations are so easy to game. So people are setting up citation cartels: “Yes, we will get all of our other clients to cite you, and nobody will notice because we’re doing it in this algorithmic, mixed-up way.” Eventually, people do notice, but it’s the insistence on citations as the coin of the realm that all of this comes from.

For the most part, the retractions haven’t propagated; work that relied on Sato’s is still up: “His work has had a wide impact: researchers found that 27 of Sato’s retracted RCTs had been cited by 88 systematic reviews and clinical guidelines, some of which had informed Japan’s recommended treatments for osteoporosis.”

Scientific fraud leaves a real mess.

This essay suggests some ways to clean it up.

Every day’s a new… challenge … for the Harvard B School whizkid. She’s already suing the school for 25 mill because some mean people analyzed her work on ethics and uncovered research fraud. Now a different set of mean people have uncovered plagiarism all over her books. Her technique appears to be chiaroscuro — a scattering of pieces from this place and that for an overall intriguing mix of elements which must have caught the eye of the mean people.  “Gino never reached out to me for permission to use my words and my thoughts, something that high school students do on a regular basis when asking if they can use my articles for their school assignments,” said one of her, uh, sources. To which Harvard University says OUCHIE.

Yet there he remains, smiling at you from the University of Rochester faculty pages. Now, if someone years ago had put his dissertation through a simple plagiarism check, UR might have been spared a lot of embarrassment, a black eye with grant-givers, and the drawn-out business of keeping his faculty page up while trying to minimize the possibility that he’ll pull a Gino and sue everyone for $25 million. A summary of the whole sordid tale appears here, but all you need to know is that whether the bully is Marc Hauser (like Francesca Gino, another Harvard winner) or Ranga Dias, or Berislav Zlokovic, let the journal/university/NSF beware: research misconduct is a Thing.

The closer you get, the worse Harvard’s Gino looks. This is from a Vox piece.

[W]hile there are many people who could have manipulated the data for any one of the studies, the only common denominator across all of them — over eight years — was Gino…

Between the dishonesty researchers who have one by one turned out to be dishonest and the cancer research that turned out to be reusing Photoshopped versions of the same test result pictures, the last few years have been full of discomfiting reminders that, yes, some [of the highest-profile] people will cheat to get ahead in science, and we lack a robust process for catching them.

Scientific integrity currently depends on the willingness of individuals to speak out when they see fraud, and it’s precisely that willingness Gino’s [defamation] lawsuit targets.

Background here.

Blame everyone else for the falsification, and sue the pants off the whistle blowers – Harvard’s Francesca Gino, having been outed, plays the cards she’s got.

But once it turns legal, once you make it legal, you run the risk that a judge will decide Harvard’s investigation into your apparently quite extensive research misconduct (and hey take a look at one of your co-authors, Dan Ariely!) should go public.

So we can all read your insistence, in interviews with Harvard’s investigators, that a bunch of incompetent underlings did it; or, if that doesn’t work, a malicious co-author decided to sabotage you.

Ouch. Students at University Nevada Reno are embarrassed. The DEAN of their engineering school “has routinely used the pay-to-publish journal he owns as an outlet for subpar and even nonsensical papers, with the effect of drastically inflating his apparent productivity.” They want the … entrepreneur (more details here) to resign, which he certainly won’t do, and which the school won’t pressure him to do — mainly because it’s just a terrible school, and it’s unlikely to know or care what research misconduct is.