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.