New head of one of the world’s oldest universities organized a citation cartel | Hacker News Reader

New head of one of the world’s oldest universities organized a citation cartel

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This guy's antics were featured on Retraction Watch back in 2022 [0]. All of this apparently happened in plain sight—as illustrated by this (farcical, single-candidate) faculty vote getting 50% blank ballots–protest votes. Everyone there knew.

"How can we design algorithms to detect..." is the wrong question in response to this scandal—it's completely in the wrong category. IMHO! These citation cliques are unsubtle and basically trivial to detect. It's the professional work culture of research universities that's the hard, unsolved problem.

[0] https://retractionwatch.com/2022/03/25/how-critics-say-a-com... ("How critics say a computer scientist in Spain artificially boosted his Google Scholar metrics")

Yeah, the problem is not that nobody can see a solution. There are a million solutions. The problem is someone having or finding the power to implement them.

I think sometimes that people like algorithmic answers to problems because it is sort of replacement for actual power. If you can't imagine finding the power fix something that's bad yourself, at least you can contrive a logical structure that might fix it automatically.

A lot of technologists would, I think, have a much larger impact if they concerned themselves with finding political power instead.

> A lot of technologists would, I think, have a much larger impact if they concerned themselves with finding political power instead.

The problem is rather that many great programmers are "insanely bad politicians".

Programming is about working hard against all the resistance to do "the right thing", wheras politics is about "reading the room", not antagonizing important people, making phoney compromises, corrupting yourself, ...

So such programmers will hardly ever get the political power to change anything.

I'd like to shine a light on the electoral processes, everywhere. If there is a problem with power somewhere, you can often find First-Past-The-Post is being used for voting.

The mechanisms applied to creating power are often flawed, and will exaggerate problems. Implementing voting systems like Single-Transferable-Vote, can work for forming governance condo-boards, committees, municipal to national governments. These electoral reforms, can limit consolidation of power, open the field to new challengers, and reduce voter apathy.

Seeing things through an electoral reform lens, a lot of solutions seem clear. The big challenge is making progress when power doesn't want reform. (eg. Federal electoral reform in Canada)

Programming can also be about finding the best way to solve for a problem with the lowest amount of work and resistance. How do you know what “the right thing” is before you have an MVP? Hubris, that’s how.

Well, "vision" or "wisdom" is what we call that when we're talking about it favorably.

Relevant to that : every month or so HN'ers rant about "patents and how we need to fix them." Ranting is all that ever happens. They're uninterested in what it would take to actually do that.

Well they are interested in it. But they are not part of that system and don't know much about it, and even if they were how can anybody change it? That's pretty much a universal experience in the modern world: feeling disenfranchised because everything is way too complicated and overwhelming the engage constructively with.

I would like to see the mindset around here's shift from 'hacking' solutions to what problems can be hacked, to actually trying to 'solve' problems by doing the long work to figure out how to do it. It's much harder, but that's why it would be good for lots of people to be working on them.

Enacting large change involves things like journalism, activism, starting social movements, starting political clubs and parties...things that we think of anachronistic now. Certainly they're not normal. But... Probably they need to come back.

I got involved with patent issues at a previous job. It turns out that most of the patent issues that technologists deal with aren't that complex. Most people reading this could learn the basics with a little effort.

Unfortunately, most of the comments on HN about patent issues are simply wrong or irrelevant. There are a lot of myths that people believe about patents without any real evidence. Once you get clear on the basics you'll be better equipped to positively engage on patent reform.

Interesting. This aligns with my experience in ad tech and trading. People very much like to use a "source" to learn things but for some reason they don't trust the primary source.

I've observed people argue against a stated law based on a news summary of that law. I was young in the pre-Wikipedia days so I don't know if this is cultural spread of WP:NOR or if it is an independent rediscovery.

> Enacting large change involves things like journalism, activism, starting social movements, starting political clubs and parties...things that we think of anachronistic now.

I think it's more accurate to say that these are things that people in power are actively hostile to, and spend an enormous amount of time, effort, and cash to disrupt. The only way to do these things is to be financed and protected by wealthy people who see you as a tool to upset their competitors.

This is not new and is the natural order of things, but in the age of consolidation and massive wealth inequality, there's no hope. You can't attract people to your organization without using a medium operated by people who are hostile to you, if you find a platform that isn't hostile to you, they'll be attacked by a government that is hostile to you, and if you meet face to face, they'll track your cellphone or use facial recognition to flag you and associate you permanently with the people you're meeting with. Even if you try to educate yourself by reading the works of people who were in this situation in the past, the fact that you have purchased or downloaded a questionable book or visited a particular webpage will be recorded. And now AI is going to make it cheap to monitor all of this stuff simultaneously and intelligently. Self-driving spies.

I agree with everything you say, but it's not so simple right now. East Germans and Romanians had it easier. I'm starting to think that the only hope is in cult-like groups who live/work together and share data (in the same way corporations do.) Laws and practices haven't been updated to penetrate them, because laws that would allow that would also allow penetration into corporations, and they have the power to fight. Even, this chance is disappearing with the expansion of thoughtcrime and "hate" laws, where even anonymously accusing people of having an opinion becomes justification for escalating official action.

I saw a guy in a documentary explaining how an environmentally abusive or labor abusive business moves into an area and survives. They first identify all of the effective activists. They then offer them extremely well-paying jobs, either internal (head of environmental stewardship or something), or external by financing an e.g. people for sustainable development of the Bingbong Valley. Any effective activists left are destroyed by any means necessary; dig through their entire history, especially any divorces, criminal records, or possible tax difficulties. If you find anything that can get them caught up in a legal battle, tip the government off. Even if you can't, sue them for slander and libel in eight different ways. Subvert the local media by spending a ton on advertising, and make sure that they print nothing from the activist point of view and give them a press release every day to print from you. If people at the papers are defiant, consider them activists and launch the same process against them. Send them anonymous letters encouraging them to kill themselves. Attack their children, spouses and parents in the same ways. Offer them a huge payoff.

This is what always could be done. Now, there's not even a local media. Intelligence agencies will jump in and help with the slightest excuse. You can accuse them of being Nazis. Hire a transwoman of color as your spokesperson, and accuse anyone who asks your company a hard question as being a transphobic racist. You can create a thousand online sockpuppets. You can get them banned from every medium. Pretty sure that if you're Boeing, you can just shoot them, but we'll never know for certain what happened there, because the media is now owned by a dozen people and hires people to be completely incurious.

You've enumerated all the problems, which are very real. I think it's productive to look at how things sometimes get done in spite of all that.

It's never been easy, but effective tactics never disappear entirely. If you view the situation as "no hope" then you'll never find them.

Thanks for the example from the documentary:

> They first identify all of the effective activists. They then offer them extremely well-paying jobs, either internal (head of environmental stewardship or something), or external by financing an e.g. people for sustainable development of the Bingbong Valley.

From my gut feeling, I have difficulties believing that this will work: any serious/effective/annoying activist will stay a thorn in the flesh of the company, even in this new position. He will likely use the new money and influence to make make the resistance even more effective (just not by doing a frontal attack onto the financial source). In other words: to me, this rather sounds like a way the company drinking the poison on its own, so that activists don't put the poison in their drinks.

you would think, but the data have one widely know case of this happening (and his life became hell). everyone else just find a way to justify the new position and think they can "do enough from the inside".

it's the same as open source and MIT licenses btw, when you're not profiting directly from it yourself.

I mean, even with political power, you would still need to find an organization structure that doesn't long-term trend towards this sort of behavior. Solving that probably requires similar type of thinking to algorithmically solving problems, it's just a different system. Of course you couldn't implement it without political power, but it is required nonetheless.

A little step is to blame the students and other researchers who fraudulently cited his papers. They're part of the problem but often presented as victims.

when people talk about "algorithms" today is like taking about specialist in the 70s: they know they are doing something illegal/immoral but they won't stop and nobody can stop them. they just need a way to spin public perception.

in this case they wanted to keep on but putting out press release on how "they are leading the detection of the bad thing everyone knows they are doing"

just like bakman-fried mom is stanford board of ethics. lol.

Completely agree with your comment, and here you have some more examples in the Spanish university to support your thesis:

- Rafael Luque was suspended of employment for 13 years not because of blatant dishonesty but because he was signing with the King Abdulaziz University as first affiliation and that bothered his university [1]. The KAU is known for buying citations this way [2].

- Another example is Francisco Herrera Triguero [3]. He's been signing with KAU as second affiliation for years and nothing happened to him even when the story about the other guy broke out.

So yeah, maybe we don't need more algorithms but more public oversight over this stuff.

[1] (Spanish): https://elpais.com/ciencia/2023-03-31/suspendido-de-empleo-y...

[2] https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2014/10/31/to-some-a-citat...

[3] (Spanish): https://www.elsaltodiario.com/universidad/papers-y-mas-paper...

Can someone please explain how this is tolerated? Why is the guy not a laughing stock but a rector?

I could understand if it was some clever hidden cartel where people sneak in extra references that seem plausible, spread out over many people and articles. But to juts have cite only this guys garbage papers?

Also the citation / H-index metric clearly need improvements. It should be trivial to do clique detection and downrank such citations.

A somewhat rude answer may be that, despite being very old, University of Salamanca is not prestigious -- outside of the top 500 in all major global university rankings -- and is therefore more likely to be willing to employ somebody who can fake their way into appearing to be a high-impact researcher.

The university gets a cut of his grants after all

> Can someone please explain how this is tolerated? Why is the guy not a laughing stock but a rector?

Some good answers already in the comments and I just want to point out that we need to stop lending so much credence to authority and titles and better recognize that it is perfectly possible to both hold a “prestigious,” even elected title like Rector or priest or President or judge or District Attorney and be a laughing stock at the same time

It is next to impossible to detect despite being so crude.

Unless there is an explicit suspicion, nobody is going to systematically check all your citations and papers. There are simply too many of these things to do that systematically, for every researcher, grad student or professor.

The universities don't have resources for something like that - that would mean hiring multiple people doing just work like that full time. And it still wouldn't uncover the slightly more sophisticated cases, such as the professor getting a "mandatory citation" on every paper produced by the students working in their lab.

How do you think can a professor publish 20-30 journal papers a year (that's both a very common number and still quite low) when getting a single paper written and shepherded through the review process takes months in the best case and could take even 2 years in the worst for the large journals?

Yes, all the work is done by the grad students and assistant profs - and the professor's name gets added to the list of authors as a sign of respect (in the best case) or because they were told to do that (in the worst one). This is an extremely common practice.

I have personally witnessed one guy build essentially an entire fake academic career like this, by pushing grad students to credit him for work he didn't do - and he almost got away with it. He didn't obtain a tenured position at a prestigious European university only because one of the professors in the tenure committee worked with him before and knew how did he obtain those (on paper) stellar research credentials - and vetoed it.

Moreover, most of the metrics like impact factor are just a number. You can't see what they have been calculated from. Research has always been built on individual integrity and honesty. And there will always be bad apples that abuse it.

The motivations and what is on stake (your career, job, grants, etc.) are so skewed that a lot of people feel pushed into cheating like this.

> all the work is done by the grad students and assistant profs - and the professor's name gets added to the list of authors as a sign of respect (in the best case) or because they were told to do that (in the worst one). This is an extremely common practice.

Just recently, Yann LeCun bragged on Twitter about publishing over 80 papers in two years.

I wondered who he thought he was impressing. Anyone who knows anything about science knows that at least the majority of those weren't his own work.

(No disrespect intended; YLC has done important work. But that tweet was not his best idea.)

Do you know what he does all day at FB? Posts links to arxiv on workplace (which is the internal/business variant of FB). Like I'm saying you can see everything he does and he had exactly zero diffs while I was there.

I mean I respect him for his contributions but what about being more specific with the contributions, like “I brought the idea” or “I supervised the research” or even “I managed the lab and arranged for the equipments with which my students conducted research”, any would be perfectly valid contributions to science. But it seems like the academic norm is just to boast “I was an author of these shiny new papers” and the details of how are obscured away almost intentionally.

That is a paper every 9 days...

Citations attract grant money. Grant money makes you attractive to the institution.

The publisher have no reason to get at this, they actually profit quite a bit from research fraud.

Which also is very common. It took a long, long while before Macchiarini's fraudulent articles were retracted, same with some of the foundational Alzheimer-placque-articles.

Who supplies the grant money? They should have a motivation to end fraud.

Grant applications are primarily judged on the perceived strength of the research plan. The reviewers work in the same field as the applicant and are expected to judge the proposal on its merits. Citation count is therefore already not a major factor in whether a grant is awarded or not, at least in engineering.

Citation counts are considered by promotion committees though. In this case, committee members are often from different fields and have less ability to judge the quality of the applicants' work for themselves.

None of the above matters in this particular case though—the problem is that Corchado was the only candidate on the ballot: "… taking advantage of the strange surprise resignation of the previous rector, and presenting himself as the only candidate. He received the support of 6.5% of the 33,000 university members who were called to vote, with half of the faculty voting blank as a sign of protest. "

The ones in charge are usually more concerned about shielding themselves from fraud accusations than actually preventing fraud. Relying on widely accepted yet flawed rankings allows them to redirect any fingers pointing at them. Nobody was ever fired for following JCR impact factor.

Why? They answer to people outside of academia, who doesn't care and don't understand, and will be happy with seeing a notice in the press about 'another 5 million to Alzheimer's research' regardless of whether it goes into a dead end or something worthwhile.

This turned into a huge setback for Alzheimer's research specifically. Politicians and their ilk poured money into 'amyloid research' so to get money that's what you had to do, even though it was rather early on pretty well known among researchers that it wasn't a fruitful way forward.

In some level they care. Everyone wants the press to write about them "X funded research cures Alzheimer". But the feedback cycles for that are long. In the short term a fraud provides at least as much good press as a genuinely great researcher, probably more. It's hard to try some new metric if it might take two decades to show that it lead to better long-term outcomes

Could you show some examples of such breakthroughs where the bureaucrats signing off grants are mentioned?

>It should be trivial to do clique detection and downrank such citations.

How would you distinguish between a clique and a group of people who cite each other because they work on the same topic?

Check the article after this quote "Their tricks are so crude that anyone who takes a look can easily spot them"

As I'm sure you know, there is a big difference between something a human can do when they pay attention to something, vs a completely automated procedure that can be done at scale.

Yeah, I didn't catch that you have a strict requirement for full flawless automation (which the current system fails to satisfy), I thought the adjusted algorithms/indices etc would still involve some humans before having an impact

I think there is huge potential to use AI for detecting many types of academic fraud. Citations of unrelated articles should be an easy one. Flag them and then refer to human university administrators for review.

You hardly need AI for this; you only need to construct a graph of researchers with the number of citations as weights, and compare metrics of connectedness to detect cliques and other fraudulent behavior.

You're going to get a lot of false positives with such a simplistic approach. Sometimes the same group of researchers legitimately cites each other over and over because they're working on similar topics and collaborating. AI can help to reduce the false positives by looking at content to identify citations that might be out of place. Of course there will still be some false positives with any algorithm so human academic committees will still have to make the final decisions.

Unfortunately a citation, especially as a prestige or impact metric, carries associations of quality to observers outside its domain. A resource having been selected for citation implicitly signals that it wad the best choice among a field of rival candidates, yet in many cases such as you describe the truth is that it is the _only_ such work available.

This is especially problematic as some researchers build entire careers out of gatekeeping preprint access to unique, single- source primary data that only they or their lab/ staff can collect- not because of their superior ability to analyze it but because theirs is the only facility with the appropriate ensemble of apparatus on site or close at hand, or because they are the latest in a close-knit (often nepotistic) chain of custodians presiding over a certain exclusive primary source, such as a nature reserve or archaeological site.

Cliques can easily occur just by a few people researching the same thing. If you are maybe two or three research groups in the works that use a particular method to try to solve a particular problem, of course you are all going to cite each other excessively.

Yes, but we all know that the "human review" is only going to be a temporary step on the road to furthering the dystopia of 0-accountability institutions that are capable of damaging your life on the imperceptible whims of the black box and the people who train and maintain it.

I think that instead of turning over every opportunity for a human job to robots that will fail and be captured, we should be giving people those jobs. The kind of flesh bodies that are afraid of being jailed for years at a time.

This is tolerated because this is pervasive, and throwing stones in a glass house is neither safe nor rewarding

It’s probably pervasive in second and third tier research universities. It’s not pervasive in top-tier universities. Actually it’s probably not pervasive in either case, but it happens more in the former.

Stanford and Harvard just had incidents where their own top researchers got caught doing academic dishonesty of the highest order. The ivy leagues are not doing citation cartels particularly less than tier two or tier three schools.

Comparing the recent news from Harvard to the long-running scandal at Stanford doesn't seem like a fair comparison.

They had two (or a small number of) high-profile incidents. There have been thousands and thousands of researchers at those Universities during the tenure of those specific researchers. I'm open to an argument that these behaviors are more widespread than the 1/10,000 that these numbers would suggest. But even if it's 10x or 100x worse, that's still around 1%. Not "pervasive."

It's the other way around - this behaviour is so normalized and so common, that it's outright not reported on because it's such a part of daily academic work.

You have evidence for small rates of fraud, but you have feelings that suggest the numbers are enormous? And nobody reports on outright fraud? This is not my experience, and certainly not even remotely scientific.

wasn't it the President of Stanford recently?

Bruh lol. Thinking it doesn't happen at "top tier" universities is like thinking because the rich don't need to steal they don't. When in reality they steal just as much because why not.

I just finished my PhD at a "top tier" university. Everyone plays the same exact tricks. My group all self-cited and our collaborators and back and forth.

So there's no such thing as "top tier" as far as the quality goes, there's only higher paid.

> It should be trivial to do clique detection and downrank such citations.

Cliques are not the problem, in many niche areas, you will have natural cliques. It is hard to distinguish that from forceful citations like this. And, this may not be a clique. I don't think this guy was citing back researchers he forced to cite him.

> do clique detection and downrank such citations.

Sounds like a great project for someone, especially someone in academia, to lead.

Call it the C-index, after Corchado, and test it against his network

because even hard science faculties are essentially human activities, and this is political. That human showed consistent "leader" attributes, formed a support and collaboration base of other accomplished humans in that context, and convinced everyone (apparently) that this now-obvious computer trick constituted something worth promotion. It is said repeatedly that it was "crude tricks in plain sight" .. where is the mystery?

He’s a rector because he has a high H index.

Nobody cares how you get to such an index unless you commit fraud.

I think technically creating citing cartels is not breaking any research rules. Unethical but within the rules.

Forcing your subordinates to cite 20 of your unrelated papers is clear and obvious fraud.

In a poorly run academic insitutiin, this is commonplace. In an art school I worked at, all student work was required to credit the head of the school and their spouse (who also worked at the school).

> I think technically creating citing cartels is not breaking any research rules. Unethical but within the rules.

Not true, citation cartels are unethical research practices, there is no question about it.

There is also no "technically within the rules", because there are generally no specific rules.

Research rules essentially are "Don't do anything unethical", in a research ethics course you would then be given examples, like don't falsify data, dont misrepresented data, acknowledge previous work...

And while I believe the vast majority of academics follow the principles, because the rules are unspecified there is a gray zone (I believe that is a good thing we don't need to bog down scientific research by even more administration).

> Not true, citation cartels are unethical research practices, there is no question about it.

Perhaps this is obvious to others, but could you articulate the ethical principle that this violates?

Well I was trying to say that there are not clear cut don't do this or that, but instead act ethically. I would say citation stacking broadly falls under misrepresenting your research (as well as other research).

The authors artifically inflate the impact of their research thus misrepresenting how important it is. It is widely viewed as misconduct e.g. see these guidelines from T&F (most other journals would have something similar) https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/editorial-polici...

But why would the university want a guy like that as their rector? It tarnishes the name of the school.

> Corchado won the elections on May 7, after taking advantage of the strange surprise resignation of the previous rector, and presenting himself as the only candidate. He received the support of 6.5% of the 33,000 university members who were called to vote, with half of the faculty voting blank as a sign of protest.

Ran unopposed, elected on 6.5% of the vote.

> voting blank as a sign of protest.

This move will never cease to annoy the fuck out of me. Unless the election is somehow invalidated or recalled by the number of blank votes, it is completely counter-productive.

Would it be better if he got 100% of votes for him? He was the only candidate, nothing most people working there could go.

A Rector like this makes some serious money. Shouldn't other staff members be jumping at the chance?? There should be lots of candidates, no?

Nah, that's often how it works - sure, becoming a rector would mean a pay increase, but it would require you to become an administrator and stop doing what you love, most likely permanently (as the gap of being away from your field of research for multiple years makes it hard to become productive again - returning to active science is definitely possible, but rarely happens), switching your career for an entirely different one as far as day-to-day tasks go. And if you're already somewhat comfortable as a professor, why would you do that to yourself?

I've literally seen faculty 'drawing straws' as of who'll agree to be the sole candidate for a particular elected administrative position, because it's clear that one of them has to do it for the university to function, but no one wanted to.

Wait until you see how many districts for even important positions like state representative have candidates who run unopposed. You too could become a state representative if you moved to bum fuck nowhere and learned how to talk to boomers.

How to blank votes count as protest in an election where there isn't a threshold?

Protesting would mean getting some random guy to also run and make him win

It’s academia. People join the academy so they can do research and teaching and absolutely nobody wants to do this crap administrative work. So often you get situations where bad people volunteer for a job that is “prestigious” but also involves shoveling manure, and you can’t convince other people to do the job instead.

Oh dear. They really need to change the rules such that losing against blank would postpone the appointment, or something.

No, he's not a rector because he has a high H index - he's rector because he was the only candidate who applied, and if there was a competition, that factor is barely relevant, the candidate would get chosen by a faculty subjective vote, not according to score on some metric.

This is a local speciality. Sometimes, even outside.-

The Corchado issue is merely an extreme "black and white" case, whereas the overall problem is more nuanced. E.g., there is no clear line between an implicit citation cartel and a group of thought-leaders in a small community. And once you are a thought-leader in a small community, it's much easier to gain broader visibility, to obtain funding, and to influence behind-the-scenes decision making. In a way, Corchado is relatively harmless because everybody knows he is a clown. He does not have much to say in the European AI community. The real issues are in the grey areas (and the people thriving in them) that affect and taint everyone.

Grey area? Entire disciplines and research areas (theoretical macroeconomics, string theory, ...) could be so.

Holy hell that guy is corrupt. The article did not comment on why the University hired him anyyand has not fired him yet. I'm very curious about that.

As humans, we often acknowledge our species’ failings in adhering to rigor and planned systems. Humans typically acknowledge that most lawyers and politicians are corrupt, and we often even admit this is due to various incentives that exist and push people in corrupt directions… yet, humans seem surprised or scandalized when this occurs in science, academia, medicine, religion, sports, or engineering. We are all just humans. In this case, the dude optimized for a metric that would elevate his own status. Is it wrong? Yeah. Should he be in charge of anything? No. Is he unique? No.

Are we finding it surprising because academia has changed, becoming more corrupt? Or was it always corrupt, but only now coming to light with more awareness? In any case, this is unsustainable. Our civilization relies on academe to help understand and navigate our world.

it was always corrupt, and we got here despite that corruption

academia ought not to be confused with scientific and technological progress

(it's enough to look at academia's roots, it did not start with pure meritocratic institutions to put it mildly.)

Most humans are of a much higher level than those who get involved in academia. We should be surprised if an admirable person has a history of academia, because any involvement is a taint on the soul.

Here's a short article with some more links about this person: https://forbetterscience.com/2024/05/03/schneider-shorts-3-0...

Citation- and papermills are quite common and can be quite lucrative. Elsevier, Springer and the others don't really have anything to gain from stopping it.

I feel he was just unusually stupid enough to explicitly put in writing what many academics subtly and implicitly do. People cite their friends, others in the field (with an implicit quid pro quo), etc... even if the research cited has only a tenuous connection to the current paper.

The whole practice of citations is very strange. Many times, I have seen researchers search for works to cite at the time of writing! The top Google result gets cited, without the person having even read the paper before, as all they were looking for was a cite for a pretty generic claim (e.g., machine learning has been applied to health care). I'm not sure that such citations are even bad practice as statements should be evidenced by cites. But as a result, a paper getting cited (e.g., the top ranked Google search for ML and Cancer) doesn't actually mean that the cited paper truly means anything, is credible, or a meaningful scientific contribution.

This kind of “political citation” happens even without intentional fraud.

When I was in grad school it was common knowledge that if you wanted to get papers accepted you needed to cite the people on the program committee and the likely reviewers - even if you didn’t think their work was particularly relevant to what you were doing.

Not as extreme as an explicit clique telling people they have to do it, but some of the distortions are similar - senior people are senior because they are widely cited, but you have to cite them because they are senior people.

twelve wrongs don't make a right. even including reviewers as authors would automatically remove them from being reviewer....

why do you feel the need to normalize some dumb thing you were subjected to in the past?

It’s funny, I think a lot of us who didn’t come through high-level academia or post-graduate education activities have this perspective that those in higher education are amazing figures, above reproach, who do amazing works in society.

As I’ve gotten older, and had more of an opportunity to interact with these players, and read articles such as these, I now have the perspective that a lot of these folks are monsters and are some of the craziest, narcissistic, abusive people on the face of the earth. They run fiefdoms and hold power over money and prestige and those under them and because they are brilliant people, they have the ability to damage so many more people around them as they do their work.

It kind of depends on how prestigious and competitive the field is.

There are plenty of fields that are "boring" and "unattractive", where work and community is very chill and by-the-numbers.

On the other hand you have very hot and competitive fields, that will attract a certain kind of people.

And plenty of toxic / abrasive scientists get to reign free, if it just happens that they're producing the desired results.

If it helps to hear it, there definitely are amazing figures, including ones that not only do brilliant work, but are exceptionally great as fellow humans (especially humble, thoughtful, altruistic, etc.).

I don't have a complete perspective, but have heard from people at many universities. (Including from someone who'd made their way up one university, and remarked they weren't impressed by recent faculty hires there, "but I'd take a bullet for" a particular all-around great professor there.)

I think most academics are closer to the normal distributions of just people. Better educated (at least in a niche, and possibly generally) than your average person, and maybe smarter than average in some regards, but probably not a superhuman intelligence, and AFAICT not any more likely to be saintly than any other human.

There's also a lot of hustle required of many professors, so they have less time, energy, and power, for the benevolent and wise elder citizen of the university model society role, which I once imagined professors would tend to embrace.

There are also some more unfortunate dynamics going on, some places, and with some individuals especially. And there are facets of some universities that behave like maybe the most internally toxic corporation you can imagine -- except arguably worse, because the institution or individuals tend to be held less to account.

> are monsters and are some of the craziest, narcissistic, abusive people on the face of the earth

With what might be, I am sure, obvious exceptions, I have reached the personal conclusion that academia, universities, colleges, are cespits of the absolute worst, most treachearous, most cunning worst that human nature has to offer. Far from being a meritocracy, scum "floats" to the top in these environments.-

I am really curious how this fact ties into the - recently discussed here - lack of value that people more and more perceive in college degrees.-

I've found that to be true of practically every human endeavor. The ones who achieve the most prominent positions are the ones who work the system to their advantage.

It's not merely that cheaters win. It's that they are selected for it: people want them to cheat on their behalf. And they may not even be wrong about that.

I used to be a scientist back in USSR. Can't talk about it in general but where I've worked and visited I did not encounter anything that fits your description. Sure there was dirt here and there but nothing approaching the level.

Modern corporations however from my experience are quite fitting.

I've spent 15 years in academia and 10 in industry. Academia isn't worse on a per capita basis. Leaders' flaws are rawer, mainly because hardly anyone gets leadership training. And they often have more severe consequences, especially for grad students who are put in a subordinate, dependent position for an extended period of time. But IME you're at least equally likely to find psychopaths at the top of businesses.

You’re right. Plenty of research has shown C-suite execs tend to have psychopathic tendencies.

The thing about academia, though, is that there is no escape. Not only is this behavior everywhere in the academy, economics dictates with very few exceptions you are stuck in the system and have to become part of it just to subsist and participate in research.

Meanwhile in the business world it’s relatively a simple matter to quit and work elsewhere when you end up with a psycho boss, and if you’re clever it is relatively simple to be compensated in a way that makes it possible to split away and start your own business or otherwise attain a significant level of control over your own livelihood and career goals.

As the saying goes, “the only way to win is not to play” when it comes to academia. Unfortunately that just further concentrates the worst characteristics. As someone who escaped academia it isn’t lost on me that academics almost universally love communism, a system that rigidly enforces equality such that it’s impossible to excel and break away from the system. One of the wonderful things about business is you can earn enough to eventually step away.

Academia is much less centralized. My lab is basically unconstrained as long as I bring in enough funding, and although I have a department chair he has limited power to make me do things. Similarly I have almost no power over my fellow faculty members, aside from bugging them to do things. A bad PI can make their students’ and post-docs’ lives miserable, and can irritate their colleagues. But they have nothing near the power that a C-suite executive (or hell a VP) in a corporation does, simply because they don’t have the same number of people under them.

And no, you don’t see maniacal behavior everywhere. You hear a lot about the 5% who behave terribly because they draw a lot of complaints and make up approximately 100% of the reports you see on sites like RetractionWatch.

I suspect you'll find at the top of all self-styled "meritocracies" are people who have socially engineered the definition of "merit" to be them and their empire. And this is the profound problem with all "meritocratic" structures. They might start out on a small scale selecting for some genuine skill, but measuring humans can be easily gamed.

A game which narcissists win and reinforces their narcissism by telling them what they want to hear about themselves.

Any time there is power to be had, the worst people are the most incentivized to seize it. It is the nature of power and of humans.

These guys were stupid enough to put it in writing, but this happens in lots of places where you either get quid pro quo citations or just get put on an article as an author even though you contributed nothing. Unless folks start getting hit with jail time for this stuff, it's unlikely to change.

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The problem with building any system is that someone will always abuse it eventually.

Universities everywhere become corrupt, as performance doesn't matter for the staff to be paid.

The only thing that matters is political power, both for the hosting country subsidies as well as outside donations (Qatar massive donation that made Harvard president claim that a call to murder all Jews is ok is a great example).

I have no idea how to fix this at this point.

I just know that trust in academic institutions is very, very low. And justifiably so.

> performance doesn't matter for the staff to be paid.

That's not the case for the people who are in the key phase of establishing themselves as academics and who are generally not on permanent contracts. And for tenured staff, performance decides access to resources that may be as mundane as one's own research time. Conversely, the problem is a mix of extremely shallow performance metrics and a paper-pusher system in which most people get bogged down by bureaucracy by the time they get tenure (or even earlier). This means that very few people have the peace of mind that allows them to focus on high-risk fundamental research. In European AI and CS, I would claim that the ones who manage to maintain focus essentially do this in their free time and get little reward for this; the alternative, i.e., building a strong franchise, is more rewarding in terms of performance metrics.

is it me or is his google scholar page gone? i'm wondering if it's been removed by google or he removed it himself in an effort to remove 'evidence'

This used to link to his profile: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=j7syrnkAAAAJ&hl=en

It seems to have been removed some time in the last year: https://web.archive.org/web/20230701000000*/https://scholar....

good find, thanks!

in case anyone's curious, these were his numbers as of may 2023

            All   Since 2018
  Citations 44715 22788
  h-index   117   72
  i10-index 725   461

(once more amazed how incredible useful archive.org is)

Is there a reasonable case to be made for excluding citations entirely? They seem frivolous and arbitrary, and most of the genuine ones are discovered by search, so maybe we could publish without citations, and let the search be automated. The more useful element of a paper is the unique claims that it makes, and these probably should be denoted explicitly.

One large motivation for looking at citations is as a proxy for the importance or value of your claims. More productive research claims will beget more productive research, whereas trivial or dead end or uninteresting claims will just float off into the archival void. So if you want to exclude citations you need another way to measure importance quickly and impersonally across entire fields in more or less real time.

Asked a Spanish professor of computer science, and he said the system is so corrupt that nobody cares. Everybody knows about this guy, and nobody cares.

Universities are rigged by internal politics. In this case the guy will be hit by external politics later than sooner, but this will set little precedent for exemplary behaviour.

Crude? Yes, but the fault isn’t with Professor Juan Manuel Corchado.

If the most important metric is publishing and impact, measured via citation count, then the failure is institutional.

This feels a little like named social media influencers.

I wonder if things like LLM's and/or knowledge graphs could research what the rest can't.

So basically that's an offline backlink scheme.

If you observe Hacker News long enough its easy to deduce there are upvote cartels (rings) operating. If a particular submitted link has the good fortune to be put onto the screens of the folks of one of these external rings it will reliably get the 100s of upvotes needed, and fast enough, for HN's algorithms to decide it merits being promoted to the HN front page. Once there its pure gravy in terms of eyeball flow and yet more upvotes.

I've certainly given up on ever hoping a link I favor makes it to the HN front page organically without relying on shady upvote eing tactics. HN has reached a point where the upvote cartels, in effect, rule.

Its cheating. A form of corruption. A dark pattern. I've considered resorting to using it myself, but have not (so far?) out of ethical disgust.

I’ve strongly considered writing scripts for other “HN dissenters” who want to show their displeasure by automatically mass upvoting all downvoted posts and automatically undeading posts. If even a tiny fraction of the N-gate former reader base used it, cyber subversives could serious muck up this place until dang and PG start to notice.

University of Salamanca

the salamanca family

No surprise

No one else was willing to run against him. Another win for democracy!

This is a common practice is almost every research group or collaboration.

I have plenty of nasty things to say about academia. But after about 15 years in artificial intelligence, more than 80 publications, and having worked with and interacted with 15 or so research groups, I have never seen this practice. It is possible that I have been lucky (sample size of one, too), but it is also possible that this horrible unethical behaviour is less common than in "almost every research group or collaboration". If someone have numbers with solid empirical backing, I would be happy to see them.

No it's not. It's common to cite relevant papers from your collaborators (you are working on the same topic, after all). But it's an aberration to create a semi-formal system where you force your underlings to cite your papers in completely different fields.

Might as well through in my anacdata that I've never seen this in any of the groups I am familiar with during my time as a PhD student.

yea.... does it make it "good" though

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