New Delhi: Chennai’s Saveetha Dental College has figured among the top 20 dental institutions for two consecutive years — 18th in 2022 and 13th in 2023 — in the QS World University rankings. However, according to an investigation whose findings have been published in American academic journal Science, behind its high citations is an “unethical publishing scheme”.
The college administration has rubbished the allegation, calling it “propaganda” against the larger group the college is part of, and India.
Compiled by global higher education analyst Quacquarelli Symonds, the QS rankings provide comparative analysis on the performance of individual programmes at 1,594 universities in 93 locations across the world.
The investigation, conducted by the Science journal and Retraction Watch — a blog that reports on retractions of scientific papers and on related topics — indicates that the institute used self-citation, along with “a few vague sentences that it pushes into all the research papers that it publishes”.
Responding to ThePrint’s queries via email, G. Kaarthikeyan, professor and head of the periodontics department (academics) at Saveetha Dental College called the Science article “propaganda” against the Saveetha Institute of Medical And Technical Sciences — a larger group the college is part of.
“Obviously, if you publish a lot, you will cite a lot. If there is a many-fold increase in publication, one should appreciate the magnitude of hard work and research facilities created. They just cannot digest an Indian institution growing so fast. They are rubbishing the hard work of our faculty and students out of jealousy. We hope they apply the same standard to all Western institutions,” he further said.
Kaarthikeyan added that all of the college’s data is available for scrutiny in the public domain. “We are confident of the quality of our work…negative propaganda designed to make our country look bad should be strongly condemned”.
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‘Self-citation & usage of vague phrases’
Citations are references to other works — books, articles, or research papers — that are mentioned within a particular scholarly document, typically in the form of a bibliography or reference list.
Citations in research papers can be used to give credit to the original authors and sources of information, ideas, or concepts that have been used or discussed in a scholarly work or to support claims and arguments made in a paper.
By citing relevant and reputable sources, researchers demonstrate their knowledge of the existing literature and engagement with a broader academic community.
They also play a crucial role in several university ranking systems. For example, the widely recognised QS World University Rankings and Times Higher Education World University Rankings consider citation metrics as a factor in their methodologies.
Research institutions with a higher number of citations typically fare better in rankings because it suggests that their research outputs have been widely cited and recognised by other researchers.
In a previous report, ThePrint had revealed how the challenging rigour of getting research papers published in colleges — that are not equipped for research — leads to the publication of thousands of papers from India in bogus research journals.
According to the college’s website, each year hundreds of undergraduates participate in a 4-hour exam in which they are expected to write a 1,500-word manuscript on research they have conducted.
These papers are then ‘standardised’ by the faculty at the college and then submitted to and published by journals.
According to the Science report, the college uses variants of a vague phrase in all research its papers, and these papers are written in a way to cite more papers written by their own authors.
An example of usage of vague phrases in research papers is: “Our team has a wider research knowledge and experience that has been converted into high impact publications.”
To describe a research team, the institute uses various other phrases like “a wealth of research and knowledge,” “rich experience,” “extensive knowledge”, or “numerous original studies”. This appears in at least 138 articles that cite a 2019 face study by two professors of the dental college and whose text could be accessed by Google Scholar.
According to the report, the investigation by Retraction Watch found that undergraduate research paper topics range from fruit intake by students to awareness of mental health among teenagers.
According to the article, by using vague phrases, researchers can then cite dozens of papers from their Saveetha-affiliated colleagues, even when the cited articles may have nothing to do with the subject of the research article — which helps dramatically inflate the number of citations of papers linked to Saveetha.
According to the article, Adith Venugopal, an adjunct associate professor at the college, joined the dental school in 2020. His papers have had more than a thousand citations, nearly all from Saveetha.
“I realised that this may be something like a university trying to cite itself more for gaining some rankings or something of that sort,” he was quoted as saying in the Science report.
The practice of self-citation — that is, citing one’s own past work in a research paper — is looked down upon.
Weighing in on the issue, Rahul Siddharthan, a researcher at Chennai-based Institute of Mathematical Science told ThePrint, “More than 15 years ago, Mohamed el Naschie, as editor of the journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, copiously published his own papers in that journal citing himself, propelling his own citation count, his journals’ impact factor, and his university’s ranking up the lists.”
“The keepers of these metrics adjusted them to ignore self-citation, but now we have a case of institutional self-citation, deploying undergraduates for the purpose,” Siddharthan said.
“This should teach us that whatever automated metric is used for research assessment, it can be and will be gamed, and we should take such rankings and metrics, at best, as a very crude initial filter and not a measure of quality,” he added.
Dibyendu Nandi, a scientist at Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Kolkata, told ThePrint: “With the proliferation of technical publications and institutions vying for greater academic prestige, citations and rankings have replaced the quality of publications and teaching as markers of judgement.”
“A number is more convenient and so we are all reduced to this. In this environment, some institutions resort to such apparently legal, but problematic practice, of gaming citations. Eventually, therefore, one needs to be careful of all these numbers and fall back upon a judgement of quality. There is no shortcut to hard work, even in choosing the best,” Nandi added.
(Edited by Anumeha Saxena)
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