Chemistry look petrovic, one of the most cited scientists in Spain and the world, is still stunned by the offer she received from a Saudi university just before the pandemic. The researcher would get 70,000 euros in her bank account every year if she listed that Arab institution, King Saud of Riyadh, as her main place of work in one of the databases that the influential Shanghai ranking uses to determine the best universities, according to Planet. Petrovic, who works in Girona at the Catalan Institute for Water Research, would only need to enter Saudi Arabia a few times a year with three-day breaks. She declined this “indecent” offer without hesitation, but dozens of respected researchers from around the world are listed first as affiliated with Saudi universities, although this is obviously false, artificially promoting Arab institutions in international academic rankings. China, with 12 cases, and Spain, with 11, are the countries with the most researchers currently showing a notional jump to a Saudi center.
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The Shanghai ranking is the strongest in the world. Universities struggle every year to climb the ranks and gain prestige that can translate into political influence or more money for tuition. The current number one is Harvard University in the United States. The decisive factors for the promotion include the number of Nobel Prize winners and the number of professors who are included in the Highly Cited Researchers, a list by the English company Clarivate with the 7,000 scientists from all over the world whose studies are most frequently cited by other colleagues . . . Saudi universities are offering these highly-cited researchers easy money to change their main place of work in the database, a trick only spotted on Clarivate’s website. In the real world, Spanish scientists continue to work in Spain and sign their research with their Spanish institutions.
the chemist Raphael Luke He accepted a Saudi offer in 2019 and changed his credentials to initially appear as a researcher at Rey Saud University behind the back of his true employer, the University of Cordoba. The Spanish institution de facto expelled him, with a sentence of 13 years without a job or salary, EL PAÍS revealed. According to a detailed report on the case sent to this newspaper by the consulting firm SIRIS, the University of Córdoba has dropped around 150 positions in the Shanghai ranking as a result of this change hidden from Luque. Were it not for the mistaken move of Luque to the Saudi heartland, the University of Cordoba would have ranked 684th in the Shanghai rankings instead of its current 837th.
The chemist Damià Barceló in 2011 together with the Saudi Prince Ahmad bin Abdullah bin Abdul Rahman Al Saud (middle) and with Professor Naif Abdullah Al-Harbi from the King Saud University in Riyadh.ICRA
Chemist Damià Barceló was one of the first Spanish researchers to accept a Saudi offer. He has been listed as the first scientist at King Saud University since 2016, although his main engagement is the director of the Catalan Institute for Aquatic Research. Barceló assures that he was interested in analyzing contaminants in plants that are irrigated with waste water in Saudi Arabia. “The solution for us to be able to conduct these studies was to have King Saud University as our first affiliate. It was a conditio sine qua non: if I didn’t belong to King Saud, I wouldn’t be able to collect samples in Saudi Arabia,” he says.
Barceló, 69, is one of Spain’s most prolific scientists. He has completed more than 1,600 studies in his life and has achieved a new job every three days in some years. In order to get into the list of Highly Cited Researchers, quality is important, but quantity also has a big impact. As early as 2013, Barceló received an award worth 500,000 riyals (around 120,000 euros) from the current Saudi King Salmán bin Abdulaziz for his research on pollutants in water. For example, the presence of cocaine in Spanish rivers.
The chemist admits he has only traveled to Saudi Arabia once a year to collect samples and give a lecture, despite posing as a researcher for King Saud. Barceló denies receiving the 70,000 euros a year offered to other scientists, but does not reveal the terms of his contract with the Saudi university, other than explaining that they will cover all the costs of his “extremely expensive” experiments and pay him for luxury hotels , first class travel and up to 2,000 euros per conference.
Damià Barceló, Director of the Catalan Institute for Aquatic Research, received an award from the current Saudi King Salmán bin Abdulaziz in 2013.ICRA
Saudi Arabia is an Islamist dictatorship that sentences dozens of people to death each year, often by crucifixion or beheading with a sword in public places. At Rey Saud and Rey Abdaluziz universities, women are usually covered in a black niqab, the fundamentalist veil that covers the face. Barceló remembers lectures where the room was full of men and the students, separated in an adjoining room, followed the action on a screen.
Dozens of the world’s most-cited scientists have received and turned down a Saudi offer. Mira Petrovic, also from the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA), openly states that she turned down the 70,000 euros a year. Two other Spanish members of the Highly Cited Researchers list agree to discuss their cases, but anonymously. Not all suggestions are created equal. One of them says that a Saudi professor offered him about $4,000 a month in a face-to-face video conference. “They doubled my salary,” he says. The other researcher recalls receiving a message from a Spanish university intermediary who made him a ridiculous offer from King Abdulaziz University: around 11,000 euros a year in funding for a collaborative project, with the scandalous condition that in his studies to be undertaken by Saudi co-authors who would not actually do anything.
The Swiss Yoran Beldengrün, co-author of the SIRIS advisory report, emphasizes the opacity of the Saudi remittances. “Some scientists will use the money to buy a microscope and others to buy a house on the Costa Brava,” he warns. His Barcelona-based consultancy advises universities around the world. Beldengrün and his colleagues found out about the sanction against Rafael Luque while reading EL PAÍS and decided to analyze similar cases. “As far as we know, this is the first time a university has made such a decision. [dejar sin empleo y sueldo al investigador]. This decision is likely to have a huge impact not only in Spain but worldwide, prompting universities to reconsider the rights and duties of their academic staff,” argues the report.
The analysis by the Barcelona-based consultancy shows that Saudi Arabia boasts 112 researchers on the list of the world’s most-cited scientists, five times as many as Germany. One of them is Luis Martínez, Professor of Computer Languages and Systems at the University of Jaén. Martínez says he was included in the Highly Cited Researchers list in 2017 and immediately received offers from Arab universities. He turned them down for five years, but insists that last year he failed to get Spanish public funding for his projects and decided to accept a Saudi offer that had around 60,000 euros a year on the table.
Luis Martínez, Professor at the University of Jaén.UJA
Martínez is now the first researcher at Rey Saud University to appear on the list. The consulting company SIRIS calculates that the University of Jaén will also lose around 150 positions in the next Shanghai ranking as a result of this fictitious move. For five years he refused, the professor insists: “This time I said yes to survival.”
The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Jaén, Gustavo Reyes, is astonished. “We found out when the Clarivate list came out. We saw that Luis Martínez appeared at the Saudi university and we immediately called him to meet the rector. We spent the whole morning telling him that this can’t be, that it’s not ethical and that he’s a full-time professor, with an addition of exclusivity,” he recalls. Article 83 of the Universities Organic Law regulates collaboration with other institutions, but the Vice Chancellor of Jaén explains that the Rey Saud University does not accept a normal contract but requests a change of affiliation signed directly with Martínez on the Clarivate list must become . . . The University of Jaén is considering “legal action” against its own professor.
Mathematician Domingo Docampo is one of the people who knows the ins and outs of the Shanghai rankings best. He was rector of the University of Vigo and, faced with the general obsession with this academic classification, he decided to “unravel the mystery of the matter”. A decade ago, he managed to reveal the methodology of the authors of the ranking, Chinese specialists from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Docampo calls on the Spanish institutions “to stop turning a blind eye to the corrupt practices” of Saudi Arabia.
“Arab universities buy that you state that you belong to this institution. They throw you loose change, but for some researchers it’s enough money to lose their decency,” says the former rector. “The sad thing is that this is happening mostly in Spain. There are 12 cases in China and 11 here, but the Chinese population multiplies ours by 30, it’s not comparable,” Docampo laments. The UK has a further six cases, as has Italy. In Germany there are five. In France there are none.
The physicist Andrés Castellanos in his laboratory at the Institute of Material Sciences of Madrid.CSIC
Six months ago, physicist Andrés Castellanos won the National Research Prize for Young People in Spain for his promising advances in new materials of atomic thickness. The statement from the Ministry of Science states that Castellanos is a researcher at the Institute of Materials Science in Madrid, but that he himself changed his dates in 2020 to appear first on the Clarivate list as a scientist at Rey Saud University. “They asked me for this condition in order to grant me a guest scholarship with a joint project,” says the physicist. “It was a good opportunity to provide more resources to my research group,” he adds. He has been ranked as Saudi for three years.
Andrés Castellanos and Damià Barceló belong to the largest scientific body in Spain, the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC). Three other members of this institution indicated a Saudi university as their main place of work in previous years. The CSIC has launched an internal investigation on a case-by-case basis after receiving an inquiry from this newspaper.
Saudi universities sometimes use Spanish intermediaries to submit their offers. The youngest professor in Spain, mathematician Juan Luis García Guirao, has contacted several members of the Highly Cited Researchers list in recent years, urging them to change their main place of work in exchange for Arab funding through collaborative projects. García Guirao from the Polytechnic University of Cartagena was named an “distinguished scientist” by King Abdulaziz in 2020. “I was never paid, I have a strictly scientific relationship with them. In fact, I have neither been there nor set foot on King Abdulaziz University,” affirms the mathematician.
García Guirao admits that he was the one who contacted the Japanese Ai Koyanagi, a psychiatrist who studies mental disorders at the Sant Joan de Déu research institute in Barcelona. Koyanagi listed King Abdulaziz as his main place of work in 2022, leaving the public foundation ICREA, which pays his salary, in second place. The psychiatrist published 115 studies last year, almost one every three days. In many of them he signs with his colleague Josep Maria Haro, scientific director of the Sant Joan de Déu Health Park, who has been a researcher at the Rey Saud University since 2017.
Professor José Ángel Pérez from the Miguel Hernández University of Elche during a lecture in Valencia in 2019.UMH
Date expert José Ángel Pérez, professor at the Miguel Hernández University of Elche, recalls being contacted by mathematician Juan Luis García Guirao in 2020 amid a pandemic. The Saudi bid prompted Perez to list King Abdulaziz University as his main place of work on Clarivate’s list. Pérez, while wrong, did it for nothing, according to his story. He was Distinguished Affiliate Professor for one year. “I didn’t get it, so if the others got it, I was the loser on duty because it was volunteer,” he says. The date specialist knows his decision has impacted his actual employer’s position in academic rankings. “I’ll be sorry for the rest of my life. I apologized to my university,” he says.
However, researcher Jordi Sardans blames the Spanish academic system for his fictional jump to King Abdulaziz University. It is presented on its website as “PhD in Biological Sciences, graduate in Pharmacy, graduate in Chemistry, Master’s in Terrestrial Ecology and Master’s in Chemical Analysis”. He has published more than 110 studies, many in leading journals such as Nature, where a few months ago he warned of abrupt changes in ecosystems due to climate change. However, Sardans says that for seven years he had to combine a part-time job as a high school teacher with his full-time job at the Center for Ecological Research and Forest Applications, affiliated with the Autonomous University of Barcelona. “I don’t have an exclusive contract. I’m free and the Spanish government didn’t give me anything. I do cutting edge science and my pocket is zero so if I win four quarters now because I’m on the Clarivate list and things are coming to me from the outside, well, morally I feel more than capable of doing it. he is arguing.
The other four scientists in Spain who appear as Saudis on the 2022 list are marine ecologist Ángel Borja of the Basque technology center AZTI; the food expert Francesca Giampieri from the European University of the Atlantic (private, in Santander) and Rubén Domínguez and Mirian Pateiro, two researchers from the Centro Tecnolóxico da Carne, an institution dependent on the Xunta de Galicia in San Cibrao das Viñas ( Ourense ). AZTI confirms that it has authorized Ángel Borja’s agreement with King Abdulaziz University. The Italian Francesca Giampieri limits herself to explaining that she has collaborated with many universities around the world and ended her relationship with King Abdulaziz at the end of 2022, just like Borja. This newspaper tried in vain to speak to the two researchers from the Centro Tecnolóxico da Carne. A total of 19 scientists have been registered as Saudis in Spain since 2014.
Another criterion by which the Shanghai Ranking recognizes the best universities in the world is the number of studies published in two renowned scientific journals: Nature and Science. Agronomist Blanca Landa of the Córdoba Institute for Sustainable Agriculture (CSIC) shows evidence that Saudi Arabia is also trying to cheat on this factor. In November 2022, Landa received a message from a King Saud University professor. “I want you to include me in any studies you’re going to publish in Nature or other high-profile journals […]. I can send you $1,500 for each published study and invite you as a visiting professor, paying all expenses,” the Arab researcher suggested. Blanca Landa reacted immediately: “I’m not interested at all. Don’t contact me again.”
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