Did a ‘nasty’ publishing scheme support an Indian dental faculty gain high rankings? | Science

Each yr, the 500 undergraduates at Saveetha Dental Higher education in Chennai, India, participate in 4-hour exams that involve them to produce a 1500-word manuscript on research they have carried out. After school and learners critique and revise the papers, they use an on the net instrument to incorporate references to beforehand released work. Numerous of the papers are then submitted to and revealed by journals the approach contributed to the much more than 1400 scholarly operates the dental university posted previous year.

Saveetha, which calls by itself a “pioneer in undergraduate publications,” says the workout is intended to help each individual college student get practical investigation experience—as well as at minimum 10 publications stated in Scopus, the huge literature databases managed by the publisher Elsevier. The college’s web site boasts that a single Saveetha pupil printed 24 papers.

But the torrent of undergraduate manuscripts—on subject areas including fruit intake by students and consciousness of mental health amongst teens—also appears to serve a less savory purpose, an investigation by Retraction Look at has discovered. By systematically citing other papers revealed by Saveetha faculty—including papers on completely unrelated topics—the undergraduate publications have assisted substantially inflate the range of citations, a essential measure of educational benefit, connected to Saveetha.

This yr, the higher education topped the world wide list of the most cited establishments in dentistry for the next straight calendar year, in accordance to QS World University Rankings. That metric served protected the school’s place “among the leading 15 dental establishments in the world,” Saveetha introduced not long ago. It also propelled it to the prime of India’s nationwide checklist of dental educational institutions.

Self-citation has extensive been a popular—if controversial—shortcut for experts wanting to boost their tutorial standing. But the dental faculty, element of the much larger Saveetha Institute of Clinical and Technical Sciences (SIMATS), seems to have quietly pursued self-quotation at an industrial scale, garnering thousands of mentions in the scientific literature in the method.

Dental higher education officials say they are unaware of any energy to systematically use self-citation to improve the institution’s popularity. “We don’t want everything to happen in an unethical way, that is our coverage,” suggests Sheeja Varghese, SIMATS’s registrar and a professor at the dental faculty.

But many others, such as members of Saveetha’s college, are skeptical. Adith Venugopal, an adjunct associate professor, has seen his very own papers rack up a lot more than 1000 citations since signing up for the dental school in 2020. Practically all are from Saveetha. “I realized that this may be a thing like a college hoping to cite by itself extra for getting some rankings or some thing of that form,” he says, incorporating that he sees college officers “posting on a regular basis that they are pretty very published.”

Outsiders say Saveetha’s paper-producing tactic is especially built to make the self-citations seem genuine. “It’s meticulously done to mislead the reader and not to be determined by the technique as self-quotation,” asserts Theodore Eliades, a professor of orthodontics at the University of Zürich and editor-in-main of The Korean Journal of Orthodontics.

Saveetha’s system entails inserting a one, relatively obscure sentence into 1000’s of student papers, followed by references to up to two dozen articles written by Saveetha college, a evaluate of publications indexed by Google Scholar suggests. For illustration, a 2022 paper about diverse strategies for machining steel—published by a pupil and a college member at the Saveetha Faculty of Engineering in Products Today: Proceedings—includes this seemingly benign language in its introduction: “Our team has a broader investigate know-how and expertise that has been converted into significant influence publications.” It is followed by a lot more than a dozen citations of unrelated Saveetha publications.

It is not obvious when the citations are added or who provides them. But they support every of the referenced papers climb the citation ranks. Just one cited paper, for case in point, is a 2019 review by two of the dental school’s professors in the Journal of Oral Biology and Craniofacial Exploration, which describes a geometrical approach for classifying the styles of human faces—a matter with no obvious relationship to machining metal. It has garnered 169 citations in accordance to Google Scholar all but 4 are from papers prepared by Saveetha authors.

Variants of the imprecise phrase—describing a investigation group with “a prosperity of exploration and understanding,” “rich working experience,” “extensive awareness,” or “numerous primary studies”—appear in at least 138 content that cite the confront analyze and whose text could be accessed by Google Scholar.

Varghese says she is “not aware” of the self-reinforcing citation sample. But it appears to be benefiting her own perform, also. Citations of her papers began to climb in 2019, mirroring a college-large craze at the university. Her papers have now been cited 2310 situations according to Scopus, and extra than 4300 occasions according to Google Scholar—nearly often by other Saveetha publications.

Venugopal, who is also an associate professor at the University of Puthisastra, claims he first became conscious of the popular self-quotation inside the earlier 6 months. He emailed Saveetha administrators inquiring for an clarification, but has acquired no reply. In the meantime, he on a regular basis receives alerts of new citations—“again one more paper by Saveetha.”

Elsevier claims it is reviewing Saveetha’s quotation sample. A different citation-monitoring organization, Clarivate, is also shelling out attention to the college. David Pendlebury, head of study analysis at Clarivate’s Institute for Scientific Information, which maintains the quotation database Internet of Science, declined to remark exclusively on SIMATS. But in an e-mail he noted that, over the previous couple years, the company observed a 17-fold enhance in publications linked to the university, numerous in journals that Clarivate no extended involves in its database because of problematic editorial benchmarks or other problems.

Self-citation has extensive been a issue in science, though its use appears to be declining in several nations, claims Alberto Baccini of the University of Siena, an writer of a new preprint inspecting self-citation trends in 50 nations. He reported the conclusions from Saveetha may possibly aid describe why a single wide measure of self-quotation is not dropping in India and China. “We can’t exclude that institutional self-citations are the source of the Indian anomaly in our data,” Baccini mentioned.

Lecturers in India say citation gaming can be an desirable way for an establishment to increase its rankings, which can improve fundraising and help universities to hike tuition. “It’s all for fetching some superior revenue,” claims a professor of orthodontics at an Indian university who asked for anonymity for worry of reprisals. Saveetha is between India’s most high priced dental schools, he notes, charging about $10,000 a calendar year.

Some scientists say self-citation is not their only concern about Saveetha’s tactics. “I would fear substantially a lot more about substantial figures of very low-good quality papers” generated by its undergraduates, states Gautam Menon, a professor of physics and biology at Ashoka University. And Stuart Macdonald, a traveling to professor at the University of Leicester who scientific studies educational publishing, believes Saveetha’s use of learners to improve its standing is “coercive.” The follow is “nasty,” Macdonald says, “particularly if their levels are dependent on it.”