One of the most cited scientists in the world, the Spanish chemist Rafael Luque, has been suspended without pay for the next 13 years, according to Luque himself and the institution where he worked until recently, the University of Córdoba, in Spain. The university has sanctioned Luque for signing his studies as a researcher at other centers, such as King Saud University in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia) and the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia in Moscow, despite having a full-time civil servant contract with the Spanish institution.Luque, born in Córdoba 44 years ago, is one of the most prolific scientists in Spain. He has published some 700 studies, mainly in the field of so-called green chemistry, which tries to synthesize products, such as drugs and fuels, while generating less waste. So far this year, Luque has already published 58 studies, one every 37 hours. The chemist has been on the list of the world’s most cited researchers for five years, compiled by the specialized company Clarivate. Institutions all over the world fight to hire scientists like Luque, since one of them alone can move a center up hundreds of positions in international academic rankings, such as the influential Shanghai ranking, attracting more students and more tuition money. “Without me the University of Córdoba is going to drop 300 spots. They have shot themselves in the foot,” said Luque, who attributed the sanction to “pure envy.”
I've not really heard of Prof. Luque, but this is a pretty interesting story. How do you write papers at another institution without your home institution not finding out about it? I feel like there are layers of context I don't quite understand...
There is more than just the multiple appointments here. Pubpeer has 93 records, some for minor things like excessive self citations, but also many with repeating background noise, repeating images for different conditions, hints of paper mills etcetera. I guess the multiple appointments was how the other "efforts" were capitalized on financially.
ReplyDeleteI don't know about the paper mill stuff, but as I understand it, the point of the double affiliation is to increase the rankings of the external institutions. For example, see this news article in Science: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.334.6061.1344 I don't know how this is done nowadays, but I remember reading a blog post a few years ago where the offer was a large financial compensation in exchange for being on the premises a minimal amount of time and having double affiliation on all papers
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