How the new head of one of the oldest universities organized a citation cartel | Hacker News Reader

How the new head of one of the oldest universities organized a citation cartel

english.elpais.com

10 pointstecleandor2 comments

> Salamanca stated that there were “20 or 30” false online accounts dedicated to citing him and, in just two minutes, he offered two contradictory explanations: that they had been created by former disgruntled workers to harm him, and that “a young man” had created them to demonstrate that ResearchGate could be rigged. Next, Corchado assured that he had deleted those profiles thanks to his knowledge in cybersecurity. A ResearchGate spokesperson, however, explained that they are not aware of any computer attack and that only the creator of a profile can delete it with their password. ( emphasis mine) I laughed so hard at this. Also, him going out claiming that it's all baseless and just check Scopus to see how awesome he is, to then have el pais do exactly that to find more obvious fraud is just priceless. If it wasn't real it could be comedy.

It's terrible, and the more you look, the more guilty he appears. I'm just finding tons and tons of publications in the university book publisher that are just old (like 15 or 20 years old) PowerPoints and/or small low quality summaries of computing subjects (I guess that accompanying texts from old courses) that are filled of citations to himself that have NOTHING TO DO with the subject of the text. Then those publications are marked as edited by Japanese researchers that have nothing to do with the field. Ridiculous.

Imagine 700 hundred pages PDFs about CORBA, SOAP and PHP 101 (from 2008) mixed with citations to his IoT data analysis papers.

Like this one [0]. A publication in Spanish about "Distributed parallel systems", cathegorized as " Congreso Iberoamericano de Filosofía de la Ciencia y la Tecnología" (Iberoamerican Tech and Science Philosophy congress), with Masataka Inoue as the editor (that's an Osaka semiconductor researcher that probably is 80+ years old now), filled with ridiculous low quality documents from 20 years ago that have nothing to do with the titles, and between article and article, citations to things like "Reducing the memory size of a Fuzzy case- based reasoning system applying rough set techniques"

  0: https://gredos.usal.es/handle/10366/139686

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