Following up on the poignant story of a distinguished scientist's aspiration to become a European champion, I recommend reading a recent and insightful paper published in the journal Scientometrics. Authored by a renowned Stanford professor, the paper is titled "Evolving Patterns of Extreme Publishing Behavior Across Science."
This study analyzed extreme publishing behavior, defined as having over 60 articles indexed in Scopus in a single year. It identified 3,191 authors with such behavior in various sciences (excluding Physics) and 12,624 in Physics. China has consistently held the highest number of hyperprolific, nearly hyperprolific, and extremely prolific publishing authors for many years. Additionally, there have been significant increases in such authors in Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Spain, India, and other countries. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-024-05117-w#Sec10
The study concludes that "counting citations without adjusting for co-authorship patterns may be highly problematic." This finding corroborates previous studies by Koltun and others, providing compelling evidence that Clarivate's Highly Cited Researchers list is flawed. https://pacheco-torgal.blogspot.com/2021/11/evaluating-researchers-in-fast-and.html
In this context, several crucial questions must be asked: Why do those responsible at Clarivate refuse to correct their flawed Highly Cited Researchers List? Is it because doing so would most significantly impact Chinese researchers, leading to a substantial drop of Chinese universities in the Shanghai Ranking, which relies on that flawed list? But why would China require such condescending favor from Clarivate Analytics when they have already demonstrated the capability to ascend to the top of the innovation race through their own merit?
Declaration of Competing Interests: I declare that my scientific field, civil engineering, is being discriminated against by Clarivate's Highly Cited Researchers List. https://pacheco-torgal.blogspot.com/2020/11/why-is-clarivate-analytics-favouring.html
PS - There is only one global scientist ranking that fulfills three key criteria: precise name disambiguation, exclusion of self-citations, and the use of fractional counting. Furthermore, it remains unbiased across all scientific disciplines.
