Cash for Citations?

If you make a list ranking anything based on objective criteria, it’s going to be gamed.

Cool! I like the article’s instant reversion to boilerplate: “Academics both inside and outside Saudi Arabia warn that such practices could detract from the genuine efforts that Saudi Arabia’s universities are making to transform themselves into world-class research centers.”

Let them buy up as many academics as they like. Why shouldn’t labor benefit from this kind of capitalism for a change? Is telling an academics that they shouldn’t personally cash in on the stupid practice of rating institutions any different than telling homeowners that there’s something morally wrong with them being the ones to walk away from a house whose mortgage is for more than it’s worth?

This doesn’t seem that different from the usual academic way of doing things, in which academics with proven track record get paid by Universities/funding bodies, in exchange for citing the source of funding on any published research.

Basically, anyone with a large amount of money to spend and the ability to identify productive researchers can run a high-profile research programme. (And if you don’t personally know who the good researchers are, you can hire a consultant who does … for example, you could hire someone who has just finished a stint as a DARPA programme manager). As the usual funding bodies are being a bit tight with money at the moment, now is a good time for a non-traditional player to outbid them.

This blog post was funded by this space for hire.

In the UK, creatively maximising your department’s score on the Research Assement Exercize has a long tradition, so we’re quite used to idea of the metrics being gamed…

Not being into the academic ranking game, I see this as an easy repatriation of petro dollars. And we certainly could use any incremental help to the current account balance. Is the corruption of this list worth several million dollars per year to the country?

Would it be OK for these institutions to pay 250K (or whatever figure is necessady) to get “super-star” academics to join their faculties full-time, and for people to take the money? (Didn’t the University of Texas do something like that a couple of decade ago?)

My institution has a “conflict of commitment” policy that would (presumably) make it difficult for faculty to accept the offers as described. Any outwide *employment* (as opposed to consulting, which is OK) must be reported annually and approved annually by one’s academic supervisor…the underlying notion is that such approval will be given only sparingly.

“Academic honesty shouldn’t be a negotiable market good.”

(snicker)

Upton Sinclair (The Goose-Step: A Study of American Education, 1923) and Thorstein Veblen (The Higher Learning in America, 1918) answered this question nearly a century ago. Did you mean to say that academic honesty shouldn’t be SEEN to be a negotiable market good?

Henry: “They get decent pay, good working conditions, and, nicest of all, the ability to spend much of their work lives working on topics that they are genuinely interested in. I think there is an implicit social contract that in return for these goodies, academics shouldn’t cash out their reputations. Academic honesty shouldn’t be a negotiable market good.”

Henry, the people who run this country think otherwise (in and out of government, business and the media). And in any elite university, the administration hustles for money, gives themselves unjustified raises, while squeezing the (untenured) faculty and staff.

Perhaps, being an academic, I am misreading or misinterpreting the comments above. It seems some of them are saying that since academia has dishonest aspects, or aspects which fail to live up to the nobility it claims for itself, the KAU(ST) behaviour is no big deal.

To use academic jargon, this comes over as horseshit. Academic honesty may only be an ideal, but it seems an ideal worth aspiring to. (If you do cash out your reputation: well, each to their own, and to each according to their need, etc. But I don’t think the community should encourage or condone it.)

To J.O.P.

a bigger, more prominent Saudi institution—King Saud University in Riyadh—has climbed several hundred places in international rankings in the past 4 years largely through initiatives specifically targeted toward attaching KSU’s name to research publications, regardless of whether the work involved any meaningful collaboration with KSU researchers.

is to me a rather different kettle of fish than offering proper positions to foreign faculty. IIRC, you actually work and teach at the institution you’re affiliated to?

“A kind of social contract” is one thing, but I would have thought along with Donald Coffin that real-life binding employment contracts would also speak to the issue. Is it really true that some academics can claim affiliation with multiple institutions with no consequences?

The end of the article in _Science_ has an interesting bit about gaming citations:

” … the publication record of Khaled Al-Rasheid, a zoologist who directs DSFP [Distinguished Scientist Fellowship Program]. … started as a professor at KSU in 1992 … For the next 15 years at the university, he averaged about four research publications a year… Since 2008, however—when the university started DSFP under his leadership… has been a co-author of 139 research papers, including 49 papers in 2010 and 36 to date this year. Most of these publications, co-authored with researchers around the world, acknowledge financial support from the Center of Excellence for Research in Biodiversity at KSU, which Al-Rasheid directs. Some of the papers have been co-authored with researchers hired by KSU under the distinguished scientist program.”

If you build a botnet like this there are all kinds of ways you can use it.

SusanC :

This doesn’t seem that different from the usual academic way of doing things, in which academics with proven track record get paid by Universities/funding bodies, in exchange for citing the source of funding on any published research.

Actually, it is different in several ways.

A university directly benefits from being associated with star researchers, because universities with better reputations are able to attract more and better students (= tuition dollars), better faculty, and donations from wealthy benefactors (e.g. endowed chairs). If they are public institutions, then universities with better reputations are more likely to receive enhanced government support (e.g. funding for new buildings or new programs or faculty expansion). A university whose reputation worsens suffers the opposite in all these dimensions.

If a university gains its good reputation for the right reasons, then its increased share of the resource pie is likely to be an (approximately) efficient reallocation of resources. But if KAU gains its reputation by gaming the system (e.g. by “buying” the reputation of researchers around the world who have nothing to do with KAU), then the likely result is inefficiency. Given the chronic scarcity of resources in academia, this is an inefficiency we cannot afford.

In contrast to KAU, private and public research granting agencies (e.g. DARPA, NSF, NSERC, Rockefeller foundation, etc.) receive only one spin-off benefit from funding star researchers: they are more likely to have their own funding renewed (and hence, to perpetuate their own existence) if they maintain a reputation for funding high-quality research. Thus, in this case, incentives are aligned in a way which is more likely (although far from guaranteed) to produce an efficient allocation of resources. This is why it is considered good manners (and in some cases, mandatory) to acknowledge your funding sources in your research publications.

Furthermore, grant agencies generally do not give open-ended grants to people just because they are “star researchers”. Typically, these agencies fund specific research projects with a clear mission. (Rockefeller is perhaps the exception). This means there is transparancy and accountability in the funding process.

There is another difference as well. When you receive an ordinary research grant from most granting agencies, the use of funds is tightly controlled and audited. You must spend the money on research-related expenses (e.g. lab equipment & personnel, conference travel, etc.). You cannot spend it on a new Ferrari. This makes it credible that this grant is “supporting research”, and nothing else. In contrast, the no-strings-attached $72,000 from KAU looks less like a research grant, and more like bribery.

Finally, some people say, “Why shouldn’t a star researcher be able to cash in on his reputation?” (The pronoun “his” is appropriate, because women are conspicuously absent from KAU’s list of rent-a-profs, for reasons which should be obvious). But in fact, there are many more socially constructive ways that a star researcher can cash in on his/her reputation. These include:

Write a best-selling academic textbook (e.g. Greg Mankiw).
Writing a book for nonspecialists about his/her area of expertise (e.g. Pinker, Dawkins, Gould, Hawking, etc.)
Go on the public lecture circuit (same examples).
Have a semi-regular column in a major newspaper or other journalistic forum (e.g. Paul Krugman, Joe Stiglitz, etc.).
Accept a senior cabinet post in government (e.g. Stephen Chu).
Work as a consultant for industry (e.g. Hal Varian is now Google’s “Chief Economist”)

You may quibble about whether some of the specific examples on this list count as “socially valuable”. But the fact remains that they are at least trying to make a social contribution, rather than accepting bribes from a third-rate university in a tin-pot dictatorship.

I think it’s totally reasonable. Loads of academics collaborate with others over email, I can’t see why you couldn’t run a research group or contribute to the research life of another university on that basis. Hell, most research fellows do most their collaboration by email and only have a week or two’s direct contact a year with other workers at their university in seminars and stuff. I don’t see why it’s a scam. I think most the hostile reaction is a combination of (justifiable) contempt for Saudi politics and (unjustifiable) mild racism.

The point leederick is that what you describe is apparently not what’s going on. From Bhattacharjee’s_Science_ article

“would be expected to supervise a research group at KAU and spend a week or two a year on KAU’s campus, but that requirement was flexible, the person making the offer wrote in the e-mail. What Kirshner would be required to do, however, was add King Abdulaziz University as a second affiliation to his name on the Institute for Scientific Information’s (ISI’s) list of highly cited researchers.”

“The recruits Science spoke to say they have a genuine interest in promoting research at KAU, even though none of them knew how their individual research plans would match up with the interests and abilities of KAU’s faculty members and students.”

What would redeem this would be evidence that these folks really are supervising research groups at KAU.

Genuine academics in Saudi Arabia are not thrilled with this either: http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2011/12/18/183235.html

To add I’d never seen that “highly cited research” site, and was better off not having done so. The utter tosh they spew on that page is much worse than what KAU has done…

[aeiou] There is a huge bias towards appearance over substance in the Gulf. This is just another example of it. In my mind, it comes from a culture of laziness that prevails at the highest levels of society there.

The people in charge of everything are extremely rich because they British ceded them a peninsula that has a lot of oil in it. The pay other people to come in and extract it, and keep enormous profits. They sit around, buy very expensive things, and grow fat.

Now old money over here may be lazy, and there are plenty of lazy rich people generally, but usually the people running things, no matter how detestable we may find them in some ways, are not lazy. They are pretty hard working, for all of their greed and malfeasance.

In the Gulf, the people running things can barely trouble themselves to get up in the morning, but sometimes their dozens of servants wake them up. Once awake, they covet what the West has–usually ridiculous consumer goods–and they endeavor to purchase it. They want to purchase academic cachet, to complement everything else they’ve already purchased from the West. And so they are.

“Working hard on actual research? You must be joking. That’s for the schlubs we’re paying a paltry $72k a year to partially own and wholly manipulate. We prefer to sit here and eat, surrounded by what we own.”

It’s no different than when they hire some famous consultant to reform some government practice, then tell everyone they have lured the best consultant in the world to develop them in some way, then ignore everything the consultant says while proudly proclaiming that the best minds in the world have endeavored to solve the given problem.

Somebody here’s got to know what I’m talking about.

I know, I sound a little like Kant when he makes his broad, nation-based distinctions in his discussion of the differences between the beautiful and the sublime (“The Italians? Beautiful! The Germans? Sublime!”), but I insist that beneath my badly overgeneralized rant there is something at work.

There are traces of this througout the comments: first-rate labs that go unused, infrastructure expansion that far outpaces the institutuion’s ability to field quality faculty and students, and essentially paying accomplished people to affiliate themselves with the institution in a way that consists of an appearance only.

If you did not value reputation more than substance, you would simply not do these things.

Now it could be the case that these attempts at purchase are not unique to the region in any important way, or are not a part of the regional culture any more so than other cultures which I have not indicted in my rant. If that is the case, then I will widen my indictment accordingly.

I think rea nailed it at #1. This kind of thing is going on, in a more decorous fashion, at lots of Australian (and I suspect UK) universities, where rankings of various kinds are a big deal. But since people are happy to visit these places for a few weeks a year, the arrangements don’t cross the line into outright fraud, even if they aren’t really optimal in purely academic terms.

The big difference is that very few academics are going to want to spend significant amounts of time in Riyadh, mainly because of the political climate (the physical climate doesn’t sound too bad, but I’ve never been to check). So, we get the kind of ghost affiliations described in the article. I suspect this will also prove to be a big deal for China – the authorities want to attract outside academics and universities with the promise of something like a free speech zone, but panic at the prospect that such speech might not be contained to the campus.

Hi,

The prestige of academic institutions has been a purchased commodity for a long time now. It seems to me this particular practice is a pitifully short, narrow, shallow feeding trough compared to those many corrupt wallowing lagoons in the financial industries, professional sports arenas, political salons, executive and corporate board rooms, and other natural habitats of the voracious and swinish 1%. It doesn’t bother me much that some few academics might also have a small venue at which to feed a bit. Perhaps trickle-down does actually work sometimes, although this trickle, by comparison, is a miserly drop-by-drop. In any event, its good to see some small pittance of the oil money coming back home.

Have a great new leap year!
Antti

I once had a taxi driver try to recruit me to teach in Saudi Arabia. “They will pay you 100 thousand American dollars! In gold!”

I’m not sure if this is a typical part of the employment process. (I think this was for high school level though.)

Up to 72k rings a bell for me as the amount that Saudi Arabia offered to U.S. citizens that wouldn’t be taxed if you worked over there. But that was back in 1990 when I was there.

I am not a huge fan of the House of Saud, but I do not see anything wrong with foreign researchers collaborating and working at Saudi Arabian universities. I find most of comments here to be motivated by anti-Arab racism which because of the Israelization of the US and parts of Europe is the last acceptable form of racism for western ‘liberals’ and ‘leftists.’ Imagine if we replaced KSA in these comments with the RSA or some other fairly wealthy country in Sub-Saharan Africa? Or even better we substituted it with Israel and talked about how those ‘sneaky Jews’ were trying to game the rating system because it was part of their culture? Am I only the only person who sees this as a problem? Or racism against Arabs become so acceptable among the western intellectual left that anything goes?

“But in fact, there are many more socially constructive ways that a star researcher can cash in on his/her reputation. These include:

Write a best-selling academic textbook (e.g. Greg Mankiw).”

Snicker.

But I could use the money.

Any Saudi university that wants to add a lawyer to their ranks?
I have even written about Saudi election law already: http://andreasmoser.wordpress.com/2011/09/27/women-voting-saudi-arabia/ – albeit in a way that your king might disapprove of.

“You may steady your arms, I will go without a struggle.”
“Your decision is a wise one, yet perhaps you would have
been better off had you forced death,” the soldier’s mouth
wrinkled to a sadistic grin of knowing mirth as he prodded his
prisoner on with his sword point.

To me, the more interesting issue is not about Saudi Arabia or even this particular practice. It’s about the way in which many academics have allowed themselves to be coopted into this system of reward based on proxy metrics, and are eagerly participating in universities’ efforts to game the system.

As others have noted above, this is but a more egregious example of practices that are now ubiquitous, and widely accepted, at UK and Australian (and I assume US) universities. I was recently at a ‘strategic meeting’ where we were told, firstly, to refrain from publishing papers if we did not think they would be well cited (or if we did publish them, to hide this shameful fact from the official record), and secondly, to make sure that our publications cite our departmental colleagues as much as possible, regardless of relevance (including self-citation, since this counts in the citation metrics). Someone whose job it apparently was to puff up the average departmental citation rate spoke proudly about their efforts to ‘get rid of’ all of these embarrassing less-cited papers by assigning them Field-of-Research codes that would land them in someone else’s lap.

In my opinion, these practices go against the professional integrity that academics – just like any other professional group – ought to have. We all like to grumble about the managerialist takeover of academia, but by and large, academics go along with it. Instead, we ought to be thinking about what our responsibilities are to society, and whether it is possible to meet these responsibilities while spending so much energy jostling for advantage in a system which is increasingly incompatible with the production of anything of value.

I’d also add that this is yet another way in which the spoils of academia (money, reputation, resources) become concentrated at the top, at the expense of junior academics.

While I agree that the notion initially seems wrong, I’m not sure I can put my finger on what is actually wrong with it. For those who think it is clearly wrong, consider the following hypotheticals:

– What if the academic in question really spends two weeks at KAU, meeting with faculty, students, etc.? How is that fundamentally different from serving on the advisory board of a company?

– What if the amount of money were lower? Say the professor got $10,000 for 2 weeks of their time. (For what it’s worth, that works out to about $125/hour, which is a reasonable consulting rate.) Or $1000 for 1 day of their time?