Citation cartels help some mathematicians—and their universities—climb the rankings

Who would have thought! The "queen of sciences" (Carl Friedrich Gauss)!

"Cliques of mathematicians at institutions in China, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere have been artificially boosting their colleagues’ citation counts by churning out low-quality papers that repeatedly reference their work, according to an unpublished analysis seen by Science. As a result, their universities—some of which do not appear to have math departments—now produce a greater number of highly cited math papers each year than schools with a strong track record in the field, such as Stanford and Princeton universities. ...

The startling new analysis is the work of Domingo Docampo, a mathematician at the University of Vigo with a long-standing interest in university ranking systems. Over the past few years, Docampo had noticed that Clarivate’s list of highly cited researchers (HCRs) was gradually being taken over by lesser known mathematicians. “There were people that published in journals that no serious mathematician reads, whose work was cited by articles that no serious mathematicians would read, coming from institutions that nobody knows in mathematics,” he says. So he decided to delve into Clarivate’s data from the past 15 years to explore exactly which universities were publishing highly cited papers and who was citing them. ..."

Citation cartels help some mathematicians—and their universities—climb the rankings | Science | AAAS