Expanding upon the earlier discussion (linked above) concerning a mathematician’s paper that identified distinct patterns in papermilling—where potentially dubious behaviors were flagged by examining the publication records of two Highly Cited Researchers as illustrative examples—it is now essential to address a new study revealing substantial inflation of publication metrics across several universities.
This study, using data from Scopus and Web of Science, identified 80 universities whose research output grew by over 100% from 2019 to 2023. Notably, one university in Iraq saw a 1,500% increase, while another in Egypt experienced a nearly 1,000% rise in published papers https://direct.mit.edu/qss/article/doi/10.1162/qss_a_00339/125732/Using-Bibliometrics-to-Detect-Questionable
While many in Western academic circles have leveraged these findings to critique institutions in Iraq and Egypt, such criticism demonstrates a striking hypocrisy. It conveniently sidesteps the fact that the professor responsible for an extraordinary 336 Scopus-indexed publications in a single year was based in Denmark, rather than Iraq or Egypt.
When comparing the ratio of retracted papers per million people, the United States has twice the ratio of Egypt, while the United Kingdom's ratio is three times higher. If Iraq were included in the comparison, the figures for both the United States and the United Kingdom would look even worse. Moreover, it is worth highlighting the case of American scientists who remarkably continued to have papers published even after their deaths https://pacheco-torgal.blogspot.com/2021/08/necroauthorship-dead-scientists-who.html
PS - It is worth recalling a warning I wrote a few years ago: "...if this becomes the norm in Western countries, third-world nations may be inclined to replicate these "successful" practices, cultivating their own super-scientists. Consequently, if an African super-scientist were to emerge with 10,000 or 20,000 publications at the summit of the publishing rankings, there would be little ground for criticism..." https://pacheco-torgal.blogspot.com/2021/03/how-many-papers-can-superscientist.html
