The 14 universities with publication metrics researchers say are too good to be true

More than a dozen universities have used “questionable authorship practices” to inflate their publication metrics, authors of a new study say. One university even saw an increase in published articles of nearly 1,500% in the last four years. 

The study, published January 5 in Quantitative Science Studies, “intends to serve as a starting point for broader discussions on balancing the pressures of global competition with maintaining ethical standards in research productivity and authorship practice,” study authors Lokman Meho and Elie Akl, researchers at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon, told Retraction Watch. 

Universities manipulating publication metrics have made headlines recently. Highly cited researchers started cutting ties with schools in Saudi Arabia after an investigation revealed that institutions were offering cash in exchange for affiliation — all to boost rankings. In 2023, we covered a case in which a prominent researcher was offered money by a university senior administrator to add his name to publications, outing the scam after not getting paid. And our 2023 investigation with Science uncovered a self-citation scheme at Saveetha Dental College — affiliated with Saveetha Institute of Medical and Technical Sciences, a name you will see again below — used to boost rankings. 

“There has been speculation about universities gaming the metrics system for a while,” sleuth Dorothy Bishop said in an email, “but I’m not aware of any previous attempt to study this formally using bibliometric indicators.” Bishop said “motivations of the universities who take part in this are hard to understand, but it’s clearly done to improve performance on international rankings.”

Meho and Akl used data from Elsevier’s SciVal, Scopus, and Clarivate’s Web of Science to identify 80 universities that experienced growth in research output, as measured by number of published journal articles, of over 100% from 2019 to 2023 — far outpacing the global average of 20%. 

Of these, 14 institutions also had declines in rates of first authorship of more than 15 percentage points over four years.This rate, over five times the average decrease of 3%, could be a sign of questionable authorship practices like sold or honorary authorship, the researchers said. “Such a dramatic decline often indicates a fundamental shift in how research contributions are distributed within an institution.”

Those 14 universities are: 

An earlier preprint of the study results used different thresholds, resulting in the addition of Saveetha University and the removal of three others from the list. None of the 14 universities responded to our request for comment. 

Together, the universities saw a 234% rise in total publications over four years and a 23% drop in rates of first authorship. Eight of the 14 schools ranked at the top of the list of most significant declines in first authorship rates out of the 1,000 most-published universities. By 2023, 11 ranked among the 15 universities with lowest first authorship rates. 

Researchers also looked at hyperprolific authorship, defining it as publishing 40 or more articles annually. Combined, the 14 universities had an increase in hyperprolific authors from 23 in 2019 to 177 in 2023, an increase of 670% and a growth rate 10 times the average. However, this rate wasn’t consistent over all schools: King Saud University, for example, went from four hyperprolific authors in 2019 to 63 in 2023, a 1,500% increase. 

Researchers defined many of the hyperprolific authors among the 14 universities as “noncore,” meaning they published articles with universities they are not directly affiliated with. An increase in authors with multiple affiliations can mean a rise in ethical collaborations. But a sharp increase — as seen in some of the listed universities — can indicate “strategic efforts to amplify research output,” the researchers wrote. 

From 2019 to 2023, the percentage of articles with authors with multiple affiliations remained stable at 18%. The control group, consisting of four universities known for conventional authorship practices — California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, and the University of California, Berkeley — had a much lower proportion of papers with authors with multiple affiliations, at 6%. 

Inflating academic output “directly biases the outcomes of ranking systems, compromising their reliability and usefulness,” Meho and Akl write in the study. They conclude with a call to action for universities, funding agencies, and policymakers, among other bodies, to create and enforce more stringent guidelines and review processes around authorship practices. 

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