A view of Saveetha Dental College, Chennai.
Saveetha Dental College (SDC), Chennai, is first on the checklist of most-cited dentistry establishments on this planet, within the QS World University Rankings, and first-ranked in India’s National Institutional Ranking Framework for dental faculties.
But in keeping with a new investigation by Science and Retraction Watch, SDC could have engaged in an unethical apply referred to as excessive self-citation to spice up its quotation rating, a typical however fallible measure of analysis high quality, and propel itself to the highest of those and different rating schemes.
Extreme self-citation
When one analysis paper invokes the findings of one other paper, the latter is claimed to have been cited by the previous. The extra citations a paper has, the extra its affect on the sphere is construed to be. A typical solution to ‘hack’ this method is to generously cite one’s personal papers, even when they’re not associated meaningfully to the paper at hand.
For instance, Science and Retraction Watch reported that the introduction of a 2022 paper coauthored by SDC researchers comprises an innocuous line – “Our team has a wider research knowledge and experience that has been converted into high impact publications” – adopted by 15 citations to different SDC papers.
SDC professor Sheeja Varghese advised Science, “We don’t want anything to happen in an unethical way, that is our policy.” But an adjunct affiliate professor at SDC, Adith Venugopal, mentioned that the variety of self-citations “may be something like a university trying to cite itself more for gaining some rankings or something of that sort”.
Elsevier, Clarivate reply
As of 8.40 am on June 9, a web page on the web site of the Saveetha Institute of Medical and Technical Sciences, of which SDC is a component, proclaimed that SDC is “the highest ranked Indian Institution in QS World University Rankings”.
Since the Science and Retraction Watch investigation started, Elsevier — the publishing firm whose analysis database is one of some essential bases for establishment rankings — and Clarivate Analytics, an organization that tracks paper citations, have mentioned that they’re analyzing SDC’s quotation patterns. The Hindu is awaiting a response from SDC.
Past incidents
This case apart, self-citations to spice up institutional rankings are usually not new in India. In 2017, VelTech University, Chennai, hit the nationwide highlight after an evaluation by researchers printed in Current Science discovered that it had acquired 100/100 within the ‘citations’ part of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings; citations had been weighted at 30% of the general rating.
The evaluation reported that 86% of those citations got here from papers authored by Sundarapandian Vaidyanathan and that 96% of his citations, for papers printed in 2012-2016, had been self-citations.
Some analysis communities world wide have been recognized to keep up “citation farms”, a apply whereby they cite every others’ papers to a terrific diploma to inflate their standings.
While excessive self-citation is taken into account unethical, self-citation to a lesser extent is taken into account unavoidable in very area of interest fields, with only a few papers on the identical subject, or when researchers are embarking on an thrilling new line of analysis.
At the worldwide stage, alternatively, researchers have discovered that systematic bias has brought on citations to traditionally localise inside just a few communities and nations, creating “citation distortion”.
