According to the QS World University Rankings 2023, Saveetha Dental College in India is ranked 13th in the world in the field of dentistry, becoming the top dental school in India; Its citation ranking is as high as second in the world.
Two years ago, the school was ranked outside the top 500 in the QS World rankings.
In a short period of time, the school’s ranking has risen dramatically, from being unknown to becoming the world’s top 15 dental institutions and the world’s second most cited dental institutions. Is this a matter of accumulation or something else?
Ranking of universities supported by self citation
To find out the answer to this question, let’s take a look at the scores of Saveetha Dental School in various indicators.
Saveetha Dental School scored 100 points in two categories: citations of articles and the H-index, which partly reflects the academic level of the university; The scores in the other two categories were dismal.
In the face of such a strange situation, Retraction Watch, a famous academic anti-counterfeiting website, and Science, a top academic website, have opened their mics.
Although Saveetha Dental School is the most cited dental institution in the world for the second year in a row, according to the survey, it is not such a glorious thing: to achieve this achievement, the school is suspected of requiring undergraduate students to perform large-scale self-citations.
Improving rankings through self citation by undergraduate students? How much can this improve?
Don’t look down on this grading model, undergraduates from this school have published 1,400 Scopus indexed papers in the past year, and one undergraduate even published 23 papers in one sitting…
It is reported that the Saveetha Dental School organizes a special exam every year in order to improve its ranking. Its 500 undergraduates have four hours to write a 1,500-word essay based on their own research. Subsequently, the faculty and students further revise the paper and publish it in the journal.
To make matters worse, Saveetha Dental School will include “illicit goods” in students’ essays. For example, a relatively vague sentence is added to the paper, such as describing that a research team has “rich research and knowledge”, “rich experience” or “a lot of original research”, and then a large number of published papers from the university, including dozens of papers, even including articles unrelated to the topic of the paper.
An associate professor at the university said that since he joined the university in 2020, his paper has been cited more than 1,000 times, and almost all of the citations come from Saveetha . (What is the concept of 1000 times… Maybe some people don’t get quoted 1,000 times in their lives.)
What’s even weirder is that it’s not clear who added these references or when… Let’s just say Saveetha’s routine is real much!
Why is Saveetha Dental School trying so hard to improve its ranking?
A professor at an Indian university said efforts to improve their rankings could boost fundraising and allow schools to raise tuition, and Saveetha Dental School is one of the most expensive in India, charging about $10,000 a year. For most students in India, $10,000 a year is no small sum.
But what do students gain after paying high tuition fees? Poor quality papers…
Among the papers published by these students, many are just the results of a survey of the school’s student body, most of the topics are “whether dental students know XXX”, and some of the articles are short papers of little scientific value, such as editorials, letters, short essays, and so on.
Both Elsevier, a publisher, and Clarivate, a citation-tracking company, have expressed concern about Saveetha’s efforts to force students to self-cite and are reviewing Saveetha’s citation patterns.
The director of research analysis at the Clarivate Institute for Scientific Information noted in an email that over the past few years, the institute has noticed a 17-fold increase in publications associated with the Saveetha Institute, many of which are journals that Clarivate no longer includes.
How much is appropriate to cite your own paper?
In fact, self-referencing isn’t entirely evil. On the contrary, reasonable self-citation is actually a kind of research method that reflects the continuity of research, from which we can easily understand the continuation of a research.
But that doesn’t mean Saveetha’s behavior is problem-free, and the college’s mass self-citations reflect a bad habit of winning by quantity.
Not only academic institutions, but also some researchers have extreme self-citation. A 2019 paper published in PLos Biology explored the phenomenon of extreme self-citation.
In the paper, the authors talk about a special case: as of 2017, 94% of computer scientist Vaidyanathan’s citations came from his own papers or those of collaborators.
As an extreme self-citator, Vaidyanathan has benefited from his actions, and India’s environment minister awarded Vaidyanathan 20,000 rupees for his high yield and cited data, recognizing him as one of India’s top scholars.
Not only that, but the paper also points out that Vaidyanathan is not alone, collating a database of at least 250 researchers whose citations were more than 50 percent from themselves or their collaborators.
However, there is no good solution for extreme self-citation, because researchers have many valid reasons to cite their own research or that of their colleagues.
It is difficult to use a quantitative standard to directly determine how much of one’s own research is appropriate to cite, but in the field of research, it is certainly wrong to judge a researcher solely on the basis of citation rate.
Source: DXY