Did a ‘nasty’ publishing scheme help an Indian dental school win high rankings? | Science

Each year, the 500 undergraduates at Saveetha Dental College in Chennai, India, participate in 4-hour exams that require them to write a 1500-word manuscript on research they have conducted. After faculty and students review and revise the papers, they use an online tool to add references to previously published work. Many of the papers are then submitted to and published by journals; the process contributed to the more than 1400 scholarly works the dental school published last year.

Saveetha, which calls itself a “pioneer in undergraduate publications,” says the exercise is designed to help every student gain practical research experience—as well as at least 10 publications listed in Scopus, the vast literature database maintained by the publisher Elsevier. The college’s website boasts that one Saveetha student published 24 papers.

But the torrent of undergraduate manuscripts—on topics including fruit intake by students and awareness of mental health among teenagers—also appears to serve a less savory purpose, an investigation by Retraction Watch has found. By systematically citing other papers published by Saveetha faculty—including papers on completely unrelated topics—the undergraduate publications have helped dramatically inflate the number of citations, a key measure of academic merit, linked to Saveetha.

This year, the college topped the global list of the most cited institutions in dentistry for the second straight year, according to QS World University Rankings. That metric helped secure the school’s place “among the top 15 dental institutions in the world,” Saveetha announced recently. It also propelled it to the top of India’s national list of dental schools.

Self-citation has long been a popular—if controversial—shortcut for scientists looking to boost their academic standing. But the dental college, part of the larger Saveetha Institute of Medical and Technical Sciences (SIMATS), appears to have quietly pursued self-citation at an industrial scale, garnering thousands of mentions in the scientific literature in the process.

Dental college officials say they are unaware of any effort to systematically use self-citation to boost the institution’s reputation. “We don’t want anything to happen in an unethical way, that is our policy,” says Sheeja Varghese, SIMATS’s registrar and a professor at the dental school.

But others, including members of Saveetha’s faculty, are skeptical. Adith Venugopal, an adjunct associate professor, has seen his own papers rack up more than 1000 citations since joining the dental school in 2020. Nearly all are from Saveetha. “I realized that this may be something like a university trying to cite itself more for gaining some rankings or something of that sort,” he says, adding that he sees school officials “posting regularly that they are very highly published.”

Outsiders say Saveetha’s paper-writing strategy is specifically designed to make the self-citations appear legitimate. “It’s meticulously done to mislead the reader and not to be identified by the system as self-citation,” asserts Theodore Eliades, a professor of orthodontics at the University of Zürich and editor-in-chief of The Korean Journal of Orthodontics.

Saveetha’s strategy involves inserting a single, relatively vague sentence into thousands of student papers, followed by references to up to two dozen articles written by Saveetha faculty, a review of publications indexed by Google Scholar suggests. For example, a 2022 paper about different techniques for machining steel—published by a student and a faculty member at the Saveetha School of Engineering in Materials Today: Proceedings—includes this seemingly benign language in its introduction: “Our team has a wider research knowledge and experience that has been converted into high impact publications.” It is followed by more than a dozen citations of unrelated Saveetha publications.

It is not clear when the citations are added or who adds them. But they help each of the referenced papers climb the citation ranks. One cited paper, for example, is a 2019 study by two of the dental school’s professors in the Journal of Oral Biology and Craniofacial Research, which describes a geometrical method for classifying the shapes of human faces—a topic with no obvious connection to machining steel. It has garnered 169 citations according to Google Scholar; all but four are from papers written by Saveetha authors.

Variants of the vague phrase—describing a research team with “a wealth of research and knowledge,” “rich experience,” “extensive knowledge,” or “numerous original studies”—appear in at least 138 articles that cite the face study and whose text could be accessed by Google Scholar.

Varghese says she is “not aware” of the self-reinforcing citation pattern. But it appears to be benefiting her own work, too. Citations of her papers started to climb in 2019, mirroring a faculty-wide trend at the school. Her papers have now been cited 2310 times according to Scopus, and more than 4300 times according to Google Scholar—nearly always by other Saveetha publications.

Venugopal, who is also an associate professor at the University of Puthisastra, says he first became aware of the widespread self-citation within the past 6 months. He emailed Saveetha administrators asking for an explanation, but has received no reply. Meanwhile, he regularly gets alerts of new citations—”again another paper by Saveetha.”

Elsevier says it is reviewing Saveetha’s citation pattern. A different citation-tracking firm, Clarivate, is also paying attention to the school. David Pendlebury, head of research analysis at Clarivate’s Institute for Scientific Information, which maintains the citation database Web of Science, declined to comment specifically on SIMATS. But in an email he noted that, over the past few years, the firm noticed a 17-fold increase in publications linked to the school, many in journals that Clarivate no longer includes in its database because of problematic editorial standards or other issues.

Self-citation has long been a concern in science, although its use appears to be declining in many nations, says Alberto Baccini of the University of Siena, an author of a recent preprint examining self-citation trends in 50 countries. He said the findings from Saveetha might help explain why one broad measure of self-citation is not dropping in India and China. “We cannot exclude that institutional self-citations are the source of the Indian anomaly in our data,” Baccini said.

Academics in India say citation gaming can be an attractive way for an institution to boost its rankings, which can strengthen fundraising and enable schools to hike tuition. “It’s all for fetching some good revenue,” says a professor of orthodontics at an Indian university who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals. Saveetha is among India’s most expensive dental schools, he notes, charging about $10,000 a year.

Some researchers say self-citation is not their only concern about Saveetha’s practices. “I would worry much more about large numbers of low-quality papers” generated by its undergraduates, says Gautam Menon, a professor of physics and biology at Ashoka University. And Stuart Macdonald, a visiting professor at the University of Leicester who studies academic publishing, believes Saveetha’s use of students to boost her standing is “coercive.” The practice is “nasty,” Macdonald says, “particularly if their degrees are dependent on it.”