Earlier this week US News and World Report (USNWR) released, for the first time, a global ranking of universities including rankings by subject area. In mathematics, the top ten universities are:
1. Berkeley
2. Stanford
3. Princeton
4. UCLA
5. University of Oxford
6. Harvard
7. King Abdulaziz University
8. Pierre and Marie Curie – Paris 6
9. University of Hong Kong
10. University of Cambridge
The past few days I’ve received a lot of email from colleagues and administrators about this ranking, and also the overall global ranking of USNWR in which Berkeley was #1. The emails generally say something to the effect of “of course rankings are not perfect, everybody knows… but look, we are amazing!”
BUT, one of the top math departments in the world, the math department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is ranked #11… they didn’t even make the top ten. Even more surprising is the entry at #7 that I have boldfaced: the math department at King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. I’ve been in the math department at Berkeley for 15 years, and during this entire time I’ve never (to my knowledge) met a person from their math department and I don’t recall seeing a job application from any of their graduates… I honestly had never heard of the university in any scientific context. I’ve heard plenty about KAUST (the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology ) during the past few years, especially because it is the first mixed-gender university campus in Saudi Arabia, is developing a robust research program based on serious faculty hires from overseas, and in a high profile move hired former Caltech president Jean-Lou Chameau to run the school. But KAU is not KAUST.
A quick google searched reveals that although KAU is nearby in Jeddah, it is a very different type of institution. It has two separate campuses for men and women. Although it was established in 1967 (Osama Bin Laden was a student there in 1975) its math department started a Ph.D. program only two years ago. According to the math department website, the chair of the department, Prof. Abdullah Mathker Alotaibi, is a 2005 Ph.D. with zero publications [Update: Nov. 10: This initial claim was based on a Google Scholar Search of his full name; a reader commented below that he has published and that this claim was incorrect. Nevertheless, I do not believe it in any way materially affect the points made in this post.] This department beat MIT math in the USNWR global rankings! Seriously?
The USNWR rankings are based on 8 attributes:
– global research reputation
– regional research reputation
– publications
– normalized citation impact
– total citations
– number of highly cited papers
– percentage of highly cited papers
– international collaboration
Although KAU’s full time faculty are not very highly cited, it has amassed a large adjunct faculty that helped them greatly in these categories. In fact, in “normalized citation impact” KAU’s math department is the top ranked in the world. This amazing statistic is due to the fact that KAU employs (as adjunct faculty) more than a quarter of the highly cited mathematicians at Thomson Reuters. How did a single university assemble a group with such a large proportion of the world’s prolific (according to Thomson Reuters) mathematicians? (When I first heard this statistic from Iddo Friedberg via Twitter I didn’t believe it and had to go compute it myself from the data on the website. I guess I believe it now but I still can’t believe it!!)
In 2011 Yudhijit Bhattacharjee published an article in Science titled “Saudi Universities Offer Cash in Exchange for Academic Prestige” that describes how KAU is targeting highly cited professors for adjunct faculty positions. According to the article, professors are hired as adjunct professors at KAU for $72,000 per year in return for agreeing (apparently by contract) to add KAU as a secondary affiliation at ISIhighlycited.com and for adding KAU as an affiliation on their published papers. Annual visits to KAU are apparently also part of the “deal” although it is unclear from the Science article whether these actually happen regularly or not.
[UPDATE Oct 31, 12:14pm: A friend who was solicited by KAU sent me the invitation email with the contract that KAU sends to potential “Distinguished Adjunct Professors”. The details are exactly as described in the Bhattacharjee article:
From: "Dr. Mansour Almazroui" <ceccr@kau.edu.sa> Date: XXXX To: XXXX <XXXX> Subject: Re: Invitation to Join “International Affiliation Program” at King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah Saudi Arabia Dear Prof. XXXX , Hope this email finds you in good health. Thank you for your interest. Please find below the information you requested to be a “Distinguished Adjunct Professor” at KAU. 1. Joining our program will put you on an annual contract initially for one year but further renewable. However, either party can terminate its association with one month prior notice. 2. The Salary per month is $ 6000 for the period of contract. 3. You will be required to work at KAU premises for three weeks in each contract year. For this you will be accorded with expected three visits to KAU. 4. Each visit will be at least for one week long but extendable as suited for research needs. 5. Air tickets entitlement will be in Business-class and stay in Jeddah will be in a five star hotel. The KAU will cover all travel and living expenses of your visits. 6. You have to collaborate with KAU local researchers to work on KAU funded (up to $100,000.00) projects. 7. It is highly recommended to work with KAU researchers to submit an external funded project by different agencies in Saudi Arabia. 8. May submit an international patent. 9. It is expected to publish some papers in ISI journals with KAU affiliation. 10. You will be required to amend your ISI highly cited affiliation details at the ISI highlycited.com web site to include your employment and affiliation with KAU. Kindly let me know your acceptance so that the official contract may be preceded. Sincerely, Mansour
]
The publication of the Science article elicited a strong rebuttal from KAU on the comments section, where it was vociferously argued that the hiring of distinguished foreign scholars was aimed at creating legitimate research collaborations, and was not merely a gimmick for increasing citation counts. Moreover, some of the faculty who had signed on defended the decision in the article. For example, Neil Robertson, a distinguished graph theorist (of Robertson-Seymour graph minors fame) explained that “it’s just capitalism,” and “they have the capital and they want to build something out of it.” He added that “visibility is very important to them, but they also want to start a Ph.D. program in mathematics,” (they did do that in 2012) and he added that he felt that “this might be a breath of fresh air in a closed society.” It is interesting to note that despite his initial enthusiasm and optimism, Professor Robertson is no longer associated with KAU.
In light of the high math ranking of KAU in the current USNWR I decided to take a closer look at who KAU has been hiring, why, and for what purpose, i.e. I decided to conduct post-publication peer review of the Bhattacharjee Science paper. A web page at KAU lists current “Distinguished Scientists” and another page lists “Former Distinguished Adjunct Professors“. One immediate observation is that out of 118 names on these pages there is 1 woman (Cheryl Praeger from the University of Western Australia). Given that KAU has two separate campuses for men and women, it is perhaps not surprising that women are not rushing to sign on, and perhaps KAU is also not rushing to invite them (I don’t have any information one way or another, but the underrepresentation seems significant). Aside from these faculty, there is also a program aptly named the “Highly Cited Researcher Program” that is part of the Center for Excellence in Genomic Medicine Research. Fourteen faculty are listed there (all men, zero women). But guided by the Science article which described the contract requirement that researchers add KAU to their ISI affiliation, I checked for adjunct KAU faculty at Thomson-Reuters ResearcherID.com and there I found what appears to be the definitive list.
Although Neil Robertson has left KAU, he has been replaced by another distinguished graph theorist, namely Carsten Thomassen (no accident as his wikipedia page reveals that “He was included on the ISI Web of Knowledge list of the 250 most cited mathematicians.”) This is a name I immediately recognized due to my background in combinatorics; in fact I read a number of Thomassen’s papers as a graduate student. I decided to check whether it is true that adjunct faculty are adding KAU as an affiliation on their articles. Indeed, Thomassen has done exactly that in his latest publication Strongly 2-connected orientations of graphs published this year in the Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series B. At this point I started having serious reservations about the ethics of faculty who have agreed to be adjuncts at KAU. Regardless of the motivation of KAU in hiring adjunct highly cited foreign faculty, it seems highly inappropriate for a faculty member to list an affiliation on a paper to an institution to which they have no scientific connection whatsoever. I find it very hard to believe that serious graph theory is being researched at KAU, an institution that didn’t even have a Ph.D. program until 2012. It is inconceivable that Thomassen joined KAU in order to find collaborators there (he mostly publishes alone), or that he suddenly found a great urge to teach graph theory in Saudi Arabia (KAU had no Ph.D. program until 2012). The problem is also apparent when looking at the papers of researchers in genomics/computational biology that are adjuncts at KAU. I recognized a number of such faculty members, including high-profile names from my field such as Jun Wang, Manolis Dermitzakis and John Huelsenbeck. I was surprised to see their names (none of these faculty mention KAU on their websites) yet in each case I found multiple papers they have authored during the past year in which they list the KAU affiliation. I can only wonder whether their home institutions find this appropriate. Then again, maybe KAU is also paying the actual universities the faculty they are citation borrowing belong to? But assume for a moment that they aren’t, then why should institutions share the credit they deserve for supporting their faculty members by providing them space, infrastructure, staff and students with KAU? What exactly did KAU contribute to Kilpinen et al. Coordinated effects of sequence variation on DNA binding, chromatin structure and transcription, Science, 2013? Or to Landis et al. Bayesian analysis of biogeography when the number of areas is large, Systematic Biology, 2013? These papers have no authors or apparent contribution from KAU. Just the joint affiliation of the adjunct faculty member. The limit of the question arises in the case of Jun Wang, director of the Beijing Genome Institute, whose affiliations are BGI (60%), University of Copenhagen (15%), King Abdulaziz University (15%), The University of Hong Kong (5%), Macau University of Science and Technology (5%). Should he also acknowledge the airlines he flies on? Should there not be some limit on the number of affiliations of an individual? Shouldn’t journals have a policy about when it is legitimate to list a university as an affiliation for an author? (e.g. the author must have in some significant way been working at the institution).
Another, bigger, disgrace that emerged in my examination of the KAU adjunct faculty is the issue of women. Aside from the complete lack of women in the “Highly Cited Researcher Program”, I found that most of the genomics adjunct faculty hired via the program will be attending an all-male conference in three weeks. The “Third International Conference on Genomic Medicine” will be held from November 17–20th at KAU. This conference has zero women. The same meeting last year… had zero women. I cannot understand how in 2014, at a time when many are speaking out strongly about the urgency of supporting females in STEM and in particular about balancing meetings, a bunch of men are willing to forgo all considerations of gender equality for the price of ~$3 per citation per year (a rough calculation using the figure of $72,000 per year from the Bhattacharjee paper and 24,000 citations for a highly cited researcher). To be clear I have no personal knowledge about whether the people I’ve mentioned in this article are actually being paid or how much, but even if they are being paid zero it is not ok to participate in such meetings. Maybe once (you didn’t know what you are getting into), but twice?!
As for KAU, it seems clear based on the name of the “Highly Cited Researcher Program” and the fact that they advertise their rankings that they are specifically targeting highly cited researchers much more for their delivery of their citations than for development of genuine collaborations (looking at the adjunct faculty I failed to see any theme or concentration of people in any single area as would be expected in building a coherent research program). However I do not fault KAU for the goal of increasing the ranking of their institution. I can see an argument for deliberately increasing rankings in order to attract better students, which in turn can attract faculty. I do think that three years after the publication of the Science article, it is worth taking a closer look at the effects of the program (rankings have increased considerably but it is not clear that research output from individuals based at KAU has increased), and whether this is indeed the most effective way to use money to improve the quality of research institutions. The existence of KAUST lends credence to the idea that the king of Saudi Arabia is genuinely interested in developing Science in the country, and there is a legitimate research question as to how to do so with the existing resources and infrastructure. Regardless of how things ought to be done, the current KAU emphasis on rankings is a reflection of the rankings, which USNWR has jumped into with its latest worldwide ranking. The story of KAU is just evidence of a bad problem getting worse. I have previously thought about the bad version of the problem:
A few years ago I wrote a short paper with my (now former) student Peter Huggins on university rankings:
P. Huggins and L.P., Selecting universities: personal preferences and rankings, arXiv, 2008.
It exists only as an arXiv preprint as we never found a suitable venue for publication (this is code for the paper was rejected upon peer review; no one seemed interested in finding out the extent to which the data behind rankings can produce a multitude of stories). The article addresses a simple question: given that various attributes have been measured for a bunch of universities, and assuming they are combined (linearly) into a score used to produce rankings, how do the rankings depend on the weightings of the individual attributes? The mathematics is that of polyhedral geometry, where the problem is to compute a normal fan of a polytope whose vertices encode all the possible rankings that can be obtained for all possible weightings of the attributes (an object we called the unitope). An example is shown below, indicating the possible rankings as determined by weightings chosen among three attributes measured by USNWR (freshman retention, selectivity, peer assessment). It is important to keep in mind this is data from 2007-2008.
Our paper had an obvious but important message: rankings can be very sensitive to the attribute weightings. Of course some schools such as Harvard came out on top regardless of attribute preferences, but some schools, even top ranked schools, could shift by over 50 positions. Our conclusion was that although the data collected by USNWR was useful, the specific weighting chosen and the ranking it produced were not. Worse than that, sticking to a single choice of weightings was misleading at best, dangerous at worse.
I was reminded of this paper when looking at the math department rankings just published by USNWR. When I saw that KAU was #7 I was immediately suspicious, and even Berkeley’s #1 position bothered me (even though I am a faculty member in the department). I immediately guessed that they must have weighted citations heavily, because our math department has applied math faculty, and KAU has their “highly cited researcher program”. Averaging citations across faculty from different (math) disciplines is inherently unfair. In the case of Berkeley, my applied math colleague James Sethian has a paper on level set methods with more than 10,000 (Google Scholar) citations. This reflects the importance and advance of the paper, but also the huge field of users of the method (many, if not most, of the disciplines in engineering). On the other hand, my topology colleague Ian Agol’s most cited paper has just over 200 citations. This is very respectable for a mathematics paper, but even so it doesn’t come close to reflecting his true stature in the field, namely the person who settled the Virtually Haken Conjecture thereby completing a long standing program of William Thurston that resulted in many of the central open problems in mathematics (Thurston was also incidentally an adjunct faculty member at KAU for some time). In other words, not only are citations not everything, they can also be not anything. By comparing citations across math departments that are diverse to very differing degrees USNWR rendered the math ranking meaningless. Some of the other data collected, e.g. reputation, may be useful or relevant to some, and for completeness I’m including it with this post (here) in a form that allows for it to be examined properly (USNWR does not release it in the form of a table, but rather piecemeal within individual html pages on their site), but collating the data for each university into one number is problematic. In my paper with Peter Huggins we show both how to evaluate the sensitivity of rankings to weightings and also how to infer bounds on the weightings by USNWR from the rankings. It would be great if USNWR included the ability to perform such computations with their data directly on their website but there is a reason USNWR focuses on citations.
The impact factor of a journal is a measure of the average amount of citation per article. It is computed by averaging the citations over all articles published during the preceding two years, and its advertisement by journals reflects a publishing business model where demand for the journal comes from the impact factor, profit from free peer reviewing, and sales from closed subscription based access. Everyone knows the peer review system is broken, but it’s difficult to break free of when incentives are aligned to maintain it. Moreover, it leads to perverse focus of academic departments on the journals their faculty are publishing in and the citations they accumulate. Rankings such as those by USNWR reflect the emphasis on citations that originates with the journals, as so one cannot fault USNWR for including it as a factor and weighting it highly in their rankings. Having said that, USNWR should have known better than to publish the KAU math rankings; in fact it appears their publication might be a bug. The math department rankings are the only rankings that appear for KAU. They have been ommitted entirely from the global overall ranking and other departmental rankings (I wonder if this is because USNWR knows about the adjunct faculty purchase). In any case, the citation frenzy feeds departments that in aggregate form universities. Universities such as King Abdulaziz, that may reach the point where they feel compelled to enter into the market of citations to increase their overall profile…
I hope this post frightened you. It should. Happy Halloween!
[Update: Dec. 6: an article about KAU and citations has appeared in the Daily Cal, Jonathan Eisen posted his exchanges with KAU, and he has storified the tweets]
88 comments
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October 31, 2014 at 10:11 am
flokapik
On another scale, that’s what some British universities do too. High profile scientists are hired part-time, and their academic achievements are counted as contributions of the university in the context of the REF…
October 31, 2014 at 11:04 am
edermitzakis
Lior, many thanks for this post, which allows at least me to explain a few things about my association. with KAU.
First of all, I agree with you that it is crazy that the KAU math department is ranked so high and it is a problem of the metrics in multiple levels that this has happened. In biology for example, KAU well below the position 100, which makes a lot more sense.
Let me also state outright that I receive financial compensation for this association, which is fully declared to my University as well as the tax authorities in CH so everything is fully transparent. Would I be affiliated and involved with what I will describe below if there was no compensation? Most likely no! But this is the case for many other activities that we do such as SABs in companies etc.
Now, is this association of scientific relevance or simply a money-making activity to “sell” citations. One could exploit it that way and in my view the people in KSA that put this together were naive to make it look like a pure citation hunting exercise. But let me say that from my perspective and after 1.5 year of being associated with CEGMR at KAU this is not the case for me.
When I was invited to become affiliated I was very suspicious. Even the message was structured in a funny way and I read the Science article discussing the issue. But I looked at it a bit deeper. I talked to a few colleagues that were already associated as well as many colleagues that were not, to get their opinion. The vast majority of those that were already associated were positive and they told me that they are involved in projects and have publications on the way. The non-associated colleagues had mixed feelings (as I did) since they had little information.
I decided to participate on an experimental basis to see what this is about. Of course, there were many problems and the gender bias that Lior mentions is there and is very well known. In my opinion, the main reason that female professors are not in the list of associated scientists is more likely due to the fact that it is hard to operate in KSA as a woman given all the restrictions so invited women would have a hard time in many of the functions taking place.
Having said that, the center I am affiliated with, CEGMR, while on the campus of the University, is at the Medical Center and is a mixed gender center. In all seminars and meetings there are both women and men (usually more women than men) and in fact my first collaborator was a woman. Here are some activities I have undertaken:
– I have already visited there 3 times and have engaged in multiple projects on colorectal cancer, breast cancer, gloioblastoma and diabetes. I have participated in the submission of 5 grant proposals (which are reviewed externally by a contract with the AAAS in the US) and have been successful in obtaining funding for 2 of them and 2 other are pending.
– We have already been analyzing RNAseq data from KAU at our lab in Geneva and more data will be coming our way for analysis.
– I have had multiple conversations and have given career advice to numerous men and women that are thinking of pursuing a career in Europe or the US.
– We are in the process of sharing with them some of our computational tools to analyze data and likely one of my post-docs will spend a week in Jeddah to install and help them run these tools.
– I have given many seminars and technical talks and have had many discussions about technical issues and experimental design.
… and many more.
I therefore strongly feel that I have attempted at least to influence and offer aspects of my experience for the improvement of the science that is performed at CEGMR.
Are there issues? Yes of course! For example, the conference that I participated only had male speakers. BUT there were a lot of women (and men) that presented posters and I was in the committee that evaluated posters and gave prizes to both women and men. In fact, in that conference women were more active in asking questions and discussing with the speakers than men and, while it may not be obvious, there are a number of fellowships just for women to go abroad and perform PhD and come back to get faculty positions.
Now about the citations: it is true that it looks a bit odd to have KAU in the list of my 4(!) affiliations. But as I said I have a total of 4 affiliations. Many of us have affiliations that are not even contributing anything financially or even in some cases scientifically but we sometimes include them. I have chosen to include KAU in some of my papers, where I admit there was no specific KAU contribution as part of the fact that I have a scientific relationship with them as I do with the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics where I actually receive no financial support either for myself or my lab. I understand that including them gives extra points to KAU but since I am paid by them and participate in scientific projects with them, why is it inappropriate to include them? There are actually many European or American institutions (I would not like to name them as if what they do is inappropriate – see comment above) that are giving joint appointments to successful people in order to increase their profile either numerically or simply by impression.
As I said above, I would not be engaged in these activities without a financial compensation but I don’t consider this as necessarily a bad thing. My goal is to engage in further collaborations, publish papers that I would not have published otherwise (in fact we are in the process of preparing two of them), and possibly make a small difference in opening the otherwise very conservative society to the scientific way of thinking we have in the “developed” world and challenge their system a bit to open their doors to more collaborations with the rest of the world. It will be a major underestimation to think that there are no good scientists in KAU or anywhere else in KSA simply because their social structure is far from what we have in Europe or the USA.
This is, of course, my perspective and my reasons for being involved. I cannot speak for all my other colleagues affiliated with KAU but I know that some of them have similar feelings and are associated for the same or similar reasons.
When I feel that the relationship no longer satisfies my criteria I will terminate it.
Manolis Dermitzakis
October 31, 2014 at 11:20 am
Konrad
The list tells us that KAU has been funding a large proportion of recent influential mathematics publications. This seems fair. It’s slightly broken because USNWR didn’t try to measure how much ($ amount) of the funding they provided, only how many (#publications, weighted by citation count) studies they funded. But it’s nonetheless interesting to learn that KAU has contributed funding to a larger number of influential studies than has MIT.
Of course if anyone wants to read these lists for “Where can I get a quality education?” rather than “Who are employing the top researchers?” they will reach the wrong conclusions. But surely we all know that already?
Gender equality is a separate issue – you are right to point out that academics should think twice before accepting tainted money.
October 31, 2014 at 11:30 am
Lior Pachter
Thanks for your comment. I understand the point you are making but I don’t think it’s accurate to claim that KAU is funding a large proportion of recent influential mathematics. They are paying (personally) a large proportion of mathematicians (and other scientists) who have in the past published highly cited (not necessarily influential) work. As an aside, most of these faculty already have very high salaries so it is not as if they are doing work that otherwise they couldn’t do because they got this money. More likely they are buying a new car with it. The reason KAU is paying for the people with the previous highly cited work, is that this way KAU gets credit for it in the rankings. For example, John Huelsenbeck’s citations are almost entirely from his papers on MrBayes. These papers were written in the time period 2001–2004. KAU had nothing to do with it, but now gets credit for it. Whether this is fair or not I don’t know, but it doesn’t feel that way.
October 31, 2014 at 12:34 pm
Konrad
KAU is not listed as an affiliation on Huelsenbeck’s 2001-2004 papers so, unless I misunderstand what USNWR are calculating, KAU is not getting credit for those older papers. Rather, they are getting credit for work (influential work, if USNWR are successful in their attempt to measure influence) done by scientists _while they were paying a significant proportion (I’m guessing it’s typically around 5%) of their salary_. This does constitute funding the research – funding mathematics consists mostly of funding the salaries of those doing the work. So I still think that KAU funded (partially, in the range of 5% of $ amount per paper) a large proportion of recent influential mathematics papers. Whereas MIT has not.
Sure, the credit is disproportional – they’re getting the same credit as other institutions that pay 100% of their employees’ salaries and/or provide valuable infrastructure; MIT probably funded a larger amount of influential mathematics, but not spread out as small components over as many individual papers – but this is not easy for USNWR to fix when affiliations are listed without percentage contributions. The fact remains that KAU are funding a sufficiently high proportion of the researchers’ time to entice them to sign their contracts. On which grounds could USNWR decline to give credit for this?
October 31, 2014 at 12:40 pm
Konrad
Just saw your update: at $6000/month plus local project funding this is much higher than my guess of 5%.
October 31, 2014 at 12:27 pm
rparthasarathy
“…But surely we all know that already?” “We” as in faculty and researchers do, but the target audience of USNWR does not. Moreover, high school students, and even undergraduates, looking into colleges and graduate schools are often remarkably naive. (Not that I really think large numbers of them will rush off to Saudi Arabia.)
November 1, 2014 at 12:42 pm
Dave Langers
Yeah, but then blame the USNWR and blame the metric and blame the naivety of the ones interpreting those rankings; don’t blame the Arabs for having a filled wallet and a business-approach to building up their science program!
I don’t see much of a problem here. So what if these scientists get a huge salary for a few weeks involvement, and so what if they buy a car? No one is forcing anyone to do anything, and as long as employer and employee agree that is great. It certainly isn’t “unethical”. I suspect many of these researchers let a lot of that money benefit their research, so that is brilliant even! I guess the excessive financial relationship could have been a bit more transparent, but we don’t have to share our salaries publicly yet, fortunately. Also, I think it is entirely normal to affiliate institutions in some but not all papers if they contribute to some but not full level. Distinguishing between work that was done on their campus or not is not very practical when research lines cross each other all the time. Nothing disproportionate in what I read.
The whole thing about equality for women is an entirely different matter. I agree that is a huge problem in that society in general, but I think it is bad style to drag that into this particular discussion. You don’t hear me criticising US scientists for the fact that they have weird views on gun laws over there. Plus, one could even argue that the best way to change their system is from within. It is up to everyone to decide for themselves where they stand, and as long as these western scientists are not promoting gender-discrimination, I think they are fine.
So, ignore the rankings, and stop the political correctness.
BTW: I have no relationship with any of the institutes or scientists involved. Just voicing my opinion.
October 31, 2014 at 1:53 pm
Lior Pachter
Just to clarify, when an investigator labels themselves at ISI as being affiliated with KAU all of their citations (including from years ago) are counting as KAU citations when organizations like USNWR tally numbers. They don’t dig down paper by paper to see where people were when they wrote it.
October 31, 2014 at 2:12 pm
Konrad
Didn’t know that. That’s crazy, and USNWR should fix it.
October 31, 2014 at 12:30 pm
rparthasarathy
This is a fascinating post, though you missed a great opportunity to cite Campbell’s law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law).
October 31, 2014 at 12:44 pm
homolog.us
“Let me also state outright that I receive financial compensation for this association, which is fully declared to my University as well as the tax authorities in CH so everything is fully transparent. Would I be affiliated and involved with what I will describe below if there was no compensation? Most likely no! But this is the case for many other activities that we do such as SABs in companies etc.
Now, is this association of scientific relevance or simply a money-making activity to “sell” citations. One could exploit it that way and in my view the people in KSA that put this together were naive to make it look like a pure citation hunting exercise. But let me say that from my perspective and after 1.5 year of being associated with CEGMR at KAU this is not the case for me.
When I was invited to become affiliated I was very suspicious. Even the message was structured in a funny way and I read the Science article discussing the issue. But I looked at it a bit deeper.
[snip of lot of excuses]
As I said above, I would not be engaged in these activities without a financial compensation but I don’t consider this as necessarily a bad thing.”
That big comment reminds me of an old joke.
Man to woman: Would you sleep with me for one million dollars?
Woman: Sure.
Man: How about for ten dollars?
Woman: What do you think I am?
Man: We’ve already established what you are. All we’re doing is bargaining about price.
October 31, 2014 at 2:25 pm
Konrad
It is generally considered ok for people to sell their services, even to for-profit corporations – which, per definition, are concerned with their own interests and not those of the public. But you are criticizing the ethics of accepting employment from an institution whose stated aims involve education and knowledge generation?
October 31, 2014 at 4:13 pm
homolog.us
The message I get from Jonathan Eisen’s blog is that he is publicly shaming the organizers of conferences, because they do not have about half speakers as women. If you really believe what you said, would you agree that Jonathan Eisen is wrong? After all, those conferences shamed by Eisen have stated aims involving education and knowledge generation, and typically have large number of posters being carried by women.
October 31, 2014 at 1:12 pm
Ghoussoub
Reblogged this on Piece of Mind and commented:
US News and World Report: Even stupider than the Maclean’s ranking
October 31, 2014 at 3:31 pm
Alberto Zaragoza Comendador
College rankings are nothing more than a pissing match. You’ve heard that a million times before, and now you’re heard it a million and one.
Make no mistake: it’s all about PR. Prestige. Being talked about. People, Saudis in this case, want to be SEEN as smart. Whether KAU makes any contribution to the world is irrelevant.
It’s the same reason why 1 in 2 people joining the workforce in developed countries now has a college degree…does anybody in his right mind think half of all new jobs require four years of tertiary education?! (Let’s not even mention >20% unemployment in some of these countries, including my own – just what are all these grads going to do?)
October 31, 2014 at 4:03 pm
idoerg
Thanks for mentioning me Lior. I would like to point out that it was Ruchira Datta, (who I believe got her PhD in your department!) drew my attention to the highly cited list.
November 1, 2014 at 6:46 am
Truth hurts
Hi everybody, i think that it is because of a dozen of ISI highly cited and nobel price scientists that some of these universities are now among the ‘ top 20’ in maths; you mentionned KAU but there is also KSU, and KFPMU. So i would have preferred that you also cite these scientists like Elias Stein, Hitoshi, Vieri Benci, and many others
November 1, 2014 at 7:57 am
Lior Pachter
You are absolutely right and I am working on compiling the list of all scientists who affiliated themselves with these universities to post on the blog. It is a bit of work so any help would be very appreciated.
November 1, 2014 at 8:31 am
Suhyoung Choi
These institutions should publish why their weighing of the criteria are justifiable at least. For example, the engineering schools and medical schools publish huge number of SCI papers. But how much are they worth?In many fields, such as mathematics, many important proceedings are not on the SCI list. Why are these weights better than other choices? They give no reason at all. We should demand that at least since it is affecting the universities seriously. In particular, the universities and colleges in countries such as South Korea are severely affected by these methods. The ministry of Education are using these arbitrary measures to eliminate many universities currently.
November 1, 2014 at 8:52 am
Suhyoung Choi
For KAU itself, I don’t think that their method is really out of ordinary or morally degenerate. Peking University, Hongkong University and NUS as well as many others are doing these. They are encouraging their science and education in their developing countries. But what I am concerned is the method of the university evaluations.
November 1, 2014 at 11:22 am
kentclizbe
Your hypocritical piety seems to know no bounds.
What sacred academic scripture has KAU blasphemed for you to be so haughtily dismissive of their efforts?
Note that the contract shared above requires three trips to the campus per year for teaching/research/collaboration.
Which issue most appalls you? Women or hiring scientists for good money?
They’re not the same. Why you conflate them here is not clear–except to demonstrate that you are on a jihad against KAU.
How is KAU’s hiring of scientists to strengthen their program and reputation any different than the highly inflated salaries that your holy quintium (Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, Stanford) pays its professors?
http://chronicle.com/article/2013-aaup-survey-table/138291
All 5 of your holies pay professors far above the average–some above the 95th percentile of professor salaries.
How much is that per Harvard citation?
In academia money talks and b.s. whines on its blog. Just like the real world. Welcome to it.
November 1, 2014 at 3:22 pm
KK
agreed. it is just give and take. As someone from Korea pointed out, most universities follow this criteria to improve their rankings any way. i am not sure whether this is dangerous. i would definitely take up such positions if they offer me. there should be a reason why one criticises such approaches. it should be ok totally – isi cited scientists collaborate with those universities and help their research etc.
November 1, 2014 at 3:47 pm
Lior Pachter
I’d like to respond to this comment and some of the others that have been posted defending the practice of KAU and the scientists involved.
First, as the mathematics example shows, KAU has been paying a very large number of mathematicians who could not, even if they wanted to, have any meaningful collaboration with KAU. Until two years ago KAU did not have a graduate program. Consider for example that they “hired” Elias Stein from Princeton. Did he sign the contract intending to work with undergraduates at KAU on research collaborations? The idea is completely preposterous. Furthermore, the vast number of “distinguished adjunct professors” they have hired (the title itself is ridiculous) proves that there couldn’t have been a serious intention to form serious collaborative relationships with them.
Second, KAU explicitly asked participants to amend their ISI profile. This is a highly unusual request. To ask them to do so upfront for the money is the institutional equivalent to asking someone to add you as a coauthor on their paper so you can improve your citation count or h-index. Sure, some people basically do that in round about ways (e.g. PIs paying for part of some project so they can be coauthors on it) but even then, they might pay for the *research*, not give some professors a personal cheque.
Third, I would like to reiterate, as I did in the post, that I think its not only acceptable but commendable that Saudi Arabia is seeking to build quality research universities. Although one can criticize many aspects of KAUST, I do think that hiring world-class faculty there indicates a serious intention to create real science in Saudi Arabia. That’s great. But it is not at all what has been happening with the vast number of “distinguished adjunct professors” at KAU.
Fourth, most of the individuals who signed up for this could have been expected to know exactly what the real goal of the “highly cited researcher program” was, and probably did. The Science paper I cited was published 3 years ago.
Fifth, as I think the #7 ranking of KAU in the math department USNWR rankings shows, KAU succeeded in their aim. Is it really reasonable to entertain the thought that this was an accident, and that really their goal was just to build solid research groups?
Sixth, the fact that KAU has separate campuses for women and men, and that the genomics conference I mentioned has had no women for two years running matters and is part of the conversation. KAU is certainly entitled to practice segregation as it will, but faculty from overseas are not obliged to attend their conferences. Someone mentioned the US and I agree with them- if a conference in genetics is held here and there are no women speakers I would not attend, and I would the speakers to boycott as well.
Eighth, I am surprised that hardly anyone has commented on the fact that out of hundreds of faculty being paid off, there are maybe one or two women. That is sexist in and of itself, to an extent that is shocking in the year 2014. KAU appears to have spent about $100 million on *men* flying them business class to Jeddah to talk to them for a few days at a time. Of course this is their right, but it is also the right of faculty who received the solicitation to say no. I’ve received a number of emails the past few days from honorable individuals who did exactly that.
November 1, 2014 at 6:38 pm
kentclizbe
You are still conflating two completely separate issues:
First, your distaste for activities that you see as gaming a ranking system.
Second, your distaste for Saudi culture.
Untangle those for an honest discussion.
First, gaming university ranking systems is as old as university ranking systems.
Here’s the president of Northeastern University on how he gamed the ranking system to bring his school’s ranking into the valuable real estate of the US News’ top 100:
““There’s no question that the system invites gaming,” Freeland tells me. “We made a systematic effort to influence [the outcome].” He directed university researchers to break the U.S. News code and replicate its formulas. He spoke about the rankings all the time—in hallways and at board meetings, illustrating his points with charts. He spent his days trying to figure out how to get the biggest bump up the charts for his buck. He worked the goal into the school’s strategic plan. “We had to get into the top 100,” Freeland says. “That was a life-or-death matter for Northeastern.”
http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/article/2014/08/26/how-northeastern-gamed-the-college-rankings/
What’s the difference in gaming that system and gaming the citation system? Increased prestige can be manipulated–and is, every day in American academia.
As for your cultural disdain–while you’re playing quota-counter, why not check on how many gay professors were invited to each conference? How about minorities–or, what constitutes a minority in Saudi Arabia? How about counting religious affiliations of each attendee? Shoot, how sustainable is the Saudi university’s building? Do they use union labor? Are they against abortion? What about Palestine–what’s their stance? Are they including vegans in their conferences?
Where do you draw the line in imposing your cultural biases on another culture?
November 1, 2014 at 7:16 pm
Lior Pachter
I completely agree with you about Northeastern. In fact, I blogged about one of their hires earlier this year (Laszlo Barabasi), who clearly was brought in (and recently honored there) to boost their rankings. I also agree with you about the problems with gays, religions, minorities and other underrepresented groups both in the US and abroad. The difference with women is that (1) they are 50% of the population and (2) it is easy to tell when they are absent. I have no “cultural disdain” for any specific country. I am just as opposed to discrimination against women (or other groups) in the US as elsewhere.
November 2, 2014 at 1:22 pm
Konrad
I agree it would be better not to conflate these two issues.
In points 1-5 you talk about gaming the system, implying (without stating why) that it is unethical for an institution to do so, and (again without stating why) that it is unethical for scientists to accept employment from instutions that do so. These claims need justification – it seems to me that KAU is not spending their money wisely in terms of what _I_ think their aims _ought_ to be, but that is a far cry from calling them unethical. If their adminstrators are placing an inordinately high priority on ranking lists, it is a sign of incompetence rather than corruption. It’s hard to argue that people should decline offers of employment because the prospective employers are incompetently offering them too much money.
In points 6 and 8 (point 7 is a bit short to follow) you argue that it is unethical for scientists to be associated with institutions that have sexist practices. This is a separate issue and if this is what you want to debate you should state it as your primary case, not a secondary one. I’d like to know more about the extent to which KAU has a choice in this regard, given the society in which they operate.
November 1, 2014 at 10:33 pm
Samson
Let’s look at this from a humanity point of view, scientists are not different, they are not saints, sometimes they just like hookers, you sell at a price. To hell they want to help the Saudis. [Part of this comment was edited to remove inappropriate content; please see comment policy on the about page]
November 2, 2014 at 12:51 am
Michael Brundage
Just to play devil’s advocate, what’s the harm in signing on many sponsors? It works for athletes, why not academics? When mathematicians or other academics receive sponsorships, shouldn’t they disclose those sponsors in their published works, logo patches on your rain jacket, etc? Many publications such as the Journal of Experimental Biology require “financial or competing interests disclosure.”
Maybe soon KAU and other universities will start sending talent scouts to the PhD programs, to sign on prospective professors before they graduate. There could be a draft round, each university gets a number of picks, can trade them to other universities, etc.
November 2, 2014 at 11:20 am
gasstationwithoutpumps
Dave Langers wrote “I guess the excessive financial relationship could have been a bit more transparent, but we don’t have to share our salaries publicly yet, fortunately.” This misses the mark a bit, since Lior’s salary, like all UC salaries is a matter of public record and is published by California newspapers every year (the Sacramento Bee is the most frequent publisher, but even little papers like the Santa Cruz Sentinel put up the UC salary database).
So a large number of us do have to share our salaries publicly (and any UC faculty member who enters into an agreement with KAU has to disclose the relationship and the compensation to UC, though that information does not get included in the newspaper-published salary databases).
November 2, 2014 at 4:58 pm
Anon
” but even if they are being paid zero it is not ok to participate in such meetings. Maybe once (you didn’t know what you are getting into), but twice?!”…
How far do you take this Lior? In your own math department with roughly 151 faculty (as listed on this page: http://math.berkeley.edu/people/faculty), 135 by my count were male (~90%). Should you quit the department? My own department is roughly the same, as are most tech companies in the Valley (70-80% women). Should people not work for such companies?
November 2, 2014 at 11:24 pm
Lior Pachter
I think you meant to say that at Tech companies 70-80% are male. I do agree with you that the representation of women in math and more generally in STEM is abysmal. The conference I mentioned in my post is not in math but in genomics, where there is a much higher representation of women, and there is no reasonable explanation I can think of for the zero women invited to speak (two years in a row). I also think its telling that out of more than 150 “distinguished adjunct faculty” (my recent checks suggest the total number is closer to 200) there are literally one or two women. These faculty are in many cases from fields like biology where there are many women scientists.
I’d also like to point out that you extracted my quote out of the context it was in. Faculty from overseas are attending these meetings for no other reason than they got paid for their citations by KAU. It’s wrong for them to go and support the discrimination associated with the meeting even if they are not being paid, but the combination is truly morally bankrupt.
Regarding your question about companies: I’m happy to go on the record to answer “yes”.If a Tech company is 100% male I think that is a serious problem.
November 2, 2014 at 8:33 pm
GenomeCrawler
Lior,
Excellent article. I was wondering when you will visit this issue. I received an email for a Postodc position at some institution in Qatar and the salary was > 100K USD, tax free, with a long list of incentives.
I am not sure why you are giving KAUST a pass. I know several extremely talented people who went there only for money. The salaries and incentives are ridiculous. The faculty also get virtually bottomless grants and they can buy whatever they want or invite whomever they desire and fly them first class and give them fancy gifts.
What is sad is that the natives (Saudis) come third, with the majority of students coming from China and India.
GC
November 3, 2014 at 9:44 am
gasstationwithoutpumps
Lior wrote “If a Tech company is 100% male I think that is a serious problem.” That depends on the size of the company. For a company the size of Google—definitely. For a startup with 3 employees, not statistically significant. For a smallish company in a job market where there are many more men available than women—hard to say.
November 3, 2014 at 2:10 pm
kentclizbe
Star by Star, Southern Cal Builds Strength in Bioscience
http://chronicle.com/article/Star-by-Star-Southern-Cal/149797/?cid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en
“Raymond C. Stevens and Peter Kuhn, two of the country’s most successful researchers of molecular structures and processes and their application to pharmaceutical-drug manufacture and medical treatments, have become the latest hires in what the University of Southern California is billing as its “game-changing” enlistment of biomedical scientists.
In short order, the university has recruited dozens of prominent figures as it shifts its studies in life sciences from describing disease to predicting the likely course of people’s illnesses. It has intently sought out “rainmakers” who bring along federal and private support and the near-guarantee that plenty more of it will rain down on the Los Angeles institution.”
And not a woman among them!
Your quest to take on the combine evil of scientists making money and sexism may never end, Lior!
Lots of juicy targets.
November 3, 2014 at 3:44 pm
another mathematician
A relevant story about the King Abdulaziz University:
In October 2014, a journal asked me to review an article with 5 authors (2 from China + 3 more from KAU). I wrote back explaining that I have already submitted a very critical review of that paper to another journal back in 2011-2012. Since the paper did not really change, all of my prior technical concerns were still relevant.
In fact, I found only three differences between the 2 versions of the manuscript:
* back in 2011/2012, the paper had only two authors (both of them from China);
* the “updated” 2014 submission also lists a secondary KAU-affiliation for the 1st author;
* it also states that the research was financed by a grant from KAU (received after 2012).
I’ve explained this whole charade to the editor & requested a formal investiagtion of possible research misconduct, asking them also to contact KAU (per COPE standards). The editor thanked me, but explained that, beyond an acceptance/rejection decision, his journal is not interested in following up with any other institutions. I have then forwarded our email exchange to KAU administrators (the president’s office, the dean of research, and the chair of their math department) but did not get any response from any of them. My email included the following paragraph:
“I believe that your university should conduct a formal investigation to determine if the authors’ conduct has been fully ethical. If it is unethical but does not receive any official reaction, this might cast a shadow on the reputation of the DSR-KAU and of the entire KAU in the future.
After all, you would not want the international scientific community to think that KAU faculty members are added as authors to papers they have not written and that KAU funding is simply used to secure such ‘guest authorships’.”
But based on Lior’s description, it seems that I was rather naive to assume that anyone at KAU would care about this…
November 6, 2014 at 11:45 am
disgusted
Buying authorship spots for employees of Saudi universities + buying afilliations of highly cited scientists is all part of the country’s propoganda for local public consumption.
it has a lot more to do with politics than academics.
so no, you’re not naive, you’re just ignorant of this country’s internal politics.
The Saudi academics who were appalled at all of this and tried to fight it are the ones who were irredeemably naive… they should have known their country better!
Anyway, the important thing to point out is that those foreign scientists are not only involved in academically unethical practices, but they’re stealing the money of the Saudi people by agreeing to participate in this scam.
November 3, 2014 at 6:56 pm
Suhyoung Choi
I just wish to point out that in many developing countries, the people are not following academic rules of the western countries simply because they sometimes don’t know of such gentlemanly rules in the western sense. I think that it’s time that everyone try to teach the students more about these. We are just teaching them “how to”s and not “what for”s? I am sure this has something to do with the attempt to market “universities”. One of the main reason that the university system survived for more then 500 years in the west, I think, is the independence of thought from the common societal influences and concerns. I think that we are forgetting this.
November 3, 2014 at 7:32 pm
Omer Tamuz
This paper: http://www.nber.org/papers/w10803 does a very nice job in ranking (undergraduate programs at) universities, using choices made by students with multiple offers. The ranking system they suggest, based on Thurstone’s pairwise comparison method, is difficult to manipulate. I wonder if something like this can also be done for comparing research contributions.
November 3, 2014 at 7:45 pm
Lior Pachter
Thanks Omer! That’s a very interesting article and as you said the idea makes a lot of sense. My only quip is that they should know that Caltech is not spelled Cal Tech 🙂
November 4, 2014 at 12:43 am
Omer Tamuz
🙂
November 4, 2014 at 4:22 am
vd
These rankings and bibliometrics are an insult to the diversity and creative activity of scientists. They are useful mostly for scientifically incompetent managers as a tool to make decision while covering up their ass and ultimately take initiative out of the hands of practicing scientists. If we let this happen intermediaries (funding bodies, journal editors, etc. ) will determine how you will do research, on what subject, your end point, etc. Why are you all so upset that King Abdulaziz University demonstrates the stupidity of these rankings?
The reference to the Campbell’s law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law) made in an earlier post is certainly appropriate here.
November 4, 2014 at 11:39 am
Konrad
Hear hear. If blame is to be handed out, surely the guilty parties are those creating the system, not those trying to succeed by following its rules to their logical conclusion.
November 4, 2014 at 10:54 am
M. Vidyasagar
Hi Lior,
Thanks for your always thought-provoking posts.
As an employee of a state university, I cannot understand one thing. A cardinal principle of working for a state university is that one cannot be simultaneously “employed” by two institutions. Several of my Chinese colleagues spend time at top-notch Chinese universities such as Tsinghua, but for those periods they are off the UTD payroll.
If I understand the KAU model, these researchers spend only a few weeks in KSA if at all, but get paid for the full twelve months, while they are also being paid by their usual employer. Can a state university legally permit this? Even if the local authorities (Head of Department, Dean etc.) permit this, surely someone at the Regents level would make an issue of it, no?
The analogy of working for start-ups. consulting etc. is not appropriate. At my institution at least, we are limited to 48 days of consulting per year. We need not disclose the compensation, but we do need to disclose the time commitment. If people were to accept money from KAU or any other entity, at whatever fantastic rate they can command, for 48 days, then that would be legal. But the sample email you have quoted explicitly mentions a salary of $6,000 PER MONTH.
What am I missing?
Best wishes.
Sagar
November 8, 2014 at 4:45 am
Truth hurts
It is worth to mention that most of these scientists do not spend one day in KAU, they change their ISI affiliation for 100.000 USD, a kind of scientific prostitution
November 10, 2014 at 2:14 am
practicinguncertainty
Very interesting post, and an almost equally interesting comments section. I would like to further articulate what I take to be the key point in favor, Lior, of your assessment of this practice as unethical. It is this:
USNWR is ranking universities, not think-tanks or funding agencies. What this means is that the ranking systems used *are meant at their very core* to mark off *research productivity in the context of teaching*, since it is this combination that makes a university what it is. The USNWR rankings are *not* offered in order to help a public at large understand who has contributed most to scientific progress by funding; they’re offered as a guide to the relative value of different universities–not *for science per se*, but *as universities*. We generally take it as given (which is potentially problematic in itself, though I’m fine with it) that research productivity/impact accomplished largely in the settings where teaching takes place has a salutary impact on the education received by attendees of universities. So, for normal educational institutions (i.e., universities whose affiliated faculty regularly teach, advise, perform committee work, etc.–are literally around–for good stretches of most years), the research productivity/impact of affiliated faculty serves as a kind of proxy for the quality of the institution *as a university*.
Again, the question of the ethics of gaming USNWR/other rankings systems has very little to do with the extent to which KAU (or any other university) has contributed to progress in scientific research. So, as far as slapping a KAU on the affiliation section goes, as others have noted in the comments here, there’s nothing especially unethical about that if KAU has offered substantive material support that contributed in some way to one’s thinking (perhaps all those long drives in the new car were especially stimulating–but seriously . . .). Affiliation on publications does *exactly* what USNWR *does not do*, i.e., serves as a measure of who is funding what, where material support for progress in science is coming from.
KAU is wrong to game USNWR–and scientists who should know better are wrong to participate in what they know to be aimed at gaming USNWR–*not* because they are falsely claiming support (apart from the logistical problem of claiming support that extends too far back, which is obviously fraudulent whenever that happens), *but rather* because they are creating a false impression of the educational environment at the actual university itself. Unless they are conducting seminars of truly extraordinary intensity and are extremely engaged online in the interim (and one has to suppose that at least a few are), people who spend three weeks a year at an institution simply do not contribute to the *intellectual and educational atmosphere of that institution* in the same way as do people who teach (at least something!) for the better part of most years at an institution.
This is the essence of the gaming KAU is accomplishing: they are deliberately trying to pass their university off as having a substantially superior academic/scholarly/educational environment to what they have in fact got. And they are succeeding at that, inasmuch as their high ranking in USNWR will communicate an untrue level of quality *as a university* to all sorts of different readers of the rankings.
This is ipso facto unethical. And it is thus also unethical for scholars to take the money if they are not going to be contributing in a very substantive way to the actual university–in a manner that is equivalent to their engagement on the ground, in teaching and in service work, at their home universities. If, in fact, they *are* intending to contribute at such a high level to KAU (or whomever) in addition to their home institution, which ought not to be slighted, however, one wonders where they will find time to do any new research at all, much less highly visible and impactful research.
November 10, 2014 at 5:38 am
Haifa Alroqi
It seems that many people, including Saudis themselves, still find it difficult to believe or perhaps do not want to believe, that a Saudi university would rank high internationally. This is not the first time the Department of Mathematics at KAU scores high. It actually ranked as the 10th top mathematics department in the Academic Ranking of World Universities in Mathematics – 2014 (Shanghai Ranking). It is really sad that prejudice would blind people’s eyes to the extent that the first assumption that would come to even the most open-minded educated people is, yeah, the oil-rich third world country must have paid for it! Other people would start questioning the credibility of those rankings only because they just cannot believe that any Saudi university can make it to the list!
There are a number of incorrect claims that were presented as factual information in your article, Lior. You mentioned that that the Chair of the Department of Mathematics at KAU, Prof. Abdullah Mathker Alotaibi has zero publications. According to Researchgate.net http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Abdullah_Alotaibi7 alone, Prof. Alotaibi has 68 publications! Alotaibi got his PhD in 2005 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2009, four years after he got his PhD. This is the minimum time an assistant professor at KAU can spend before he can fulfill requirements for academic-rank promotion, and only after he has published at least four publications, two of which must be single-author publications. On his KAU webpage, Alotaibi lists 78 papers published from 2004 to 2014. Claiming that he has zero publications is inaccurate and very unjust!
A Very important point to consider here is that the ISI journal publications that are affiliated with KAU are not only authored by adjunct faculty. In fact, most of the publications are written by full-time faculty members at KAU.
A simple database search on the webpage of KAU’s Deanship of Scientific Research gives the following results for some of the ISI publications that were published from 1988 to 2008 by full-time faculty members at the Department of Mathematics at KAU:
• Naseer Shahzad (2 publications in 1992, 3 publications in 1993, 4 publications in 1994, 13 publications in 1995, 5 publications in 1996, 3 publications in 1997, 2 publications in 1998, 7 publications in 1999, 4 publications in 2000, 7 publications in 2001, 2 publications in 2002, 4 publications in 2004, 7 publications in 2004, 9 publications in 2005, 7 publications in 2006, 4 publications in 2007, 1 publication in 2008)
• Ashraf Zenkour (1 publication in 1988, 1 publication in 1989, 1 publication in 1997, 2 publications in 1998, 5 publications in 1999, 3 publications in 2000, 3 publications in 2001, 3 publications in 2003, 6 publications in 2004, 4 publications in 2005, 6 publications in 2006, 5 publications in 2007)
• Falleh Al-Solamy (3 publications in 2002, 1 publication in 2000, 1 publication in 1999, 1 publication in 2001, 5 publications in 2003, 1 publication in 2004, publication in 2005, 3 publications in 2006)
• Mohamed Khater (1 publication in 1991, 2 publications in 1992, 3 publications in 1993, 1 publication in 1994, 1 publication in 1995, 1 publication in 1998, 2 publications in 1999, 1 publication in 2001, 2 publications in 2004, 1 publication in 2005, 1 publication in 2007)
• Hassan Zedan (1 publication in 1999, 1 publication in 2001, 4 publications in 2002, 3 publications in 2003, 4 publications in 2004, 1 publication in 2005)
• Mohammed Al-Thagafi (1 publication in 1995, 1 publication in 1996, 1 publication in 2006, 2 publications in 2007)
• Mohammed Al-Shomrani (1 publication in 2004, 1 publication in 2006, 2 publications in 2007)
• Adnan Alhomaidan (1 publication in 2005, 4 publications in 2006)
• Salim Sahab (1 publication in 1987, 3 publications in 1988, 2 publications in 1989, 3 publications in 1991)
• Abdallah Abd-Elfattah (1 publication in 1992, 2 publications in 1994, 2 publications in 1996, 4 publications in 2003)
• Dawood Mashat (2 publications in 1998, 2 publications in 2003, 1 publication in 2004, 3 publications in 2005, 1 publication in 2007)
• Ahmad Al-Kenani (1 publication in 2003, 1 publication in 2004, 1 publication in 2005)
• Syed Khalid Nauman (1 publication in 2004)
• Saleh Al-Mezel (3 publications in 2008, 3 publications in 2007)
• Abdullah Al-Mazrooei (1 publication in 2008)
• Mohammed Hammodah (1 publication in 2001)
• Reem Al-Ghefari (1 publication in 2004, 3 publications in 2006)
• Abdurrahman Heliel (1 publication in 2005)
• Mohammed S. Alhuthali (1 publication in 2005)
• Eman S Al-Aidarous (1 publication in 2005, 2 publications in 2006, 1 publication in 2007)
• Bashir Ahmad (1 publication in 2001, 7 publications in 2007)
• Farahat Sayed Ali (1 publication in 2003, 1 publication in 2004)
• Hamed Al-Sulami (2 publications in 2007)
• Abdul Latif Muhammad (2 publications in 2007, 1 publication in 2008)
• Abdullah Alotaibi (3 publications in 2004, 1 publication in 2005)
• Sud Al-Sulami (1 publication in 2004, 1 publication in 2005)
• Wafaa Al-Barakati (1 publication in 1992, 1 publication in 2000, 1 publication in 2007)
• Abdullah Al-Roqi ( 1 publication in 2007)
• Ahmed A Saedi (1 publication in 2007)
According to researchgate.net, the following full-time faculty members (male & female):
• Naseer Shahzad has a total of 250 publications
• Nawab Hussain has a total of 139 publications
• Ashraf Zenkour has a total of 134 publications
• Mohamed Darwish has a total of 75 publications
• Abdullah Alotaibi has a total of 68 publications
• Abdul Latif Muhammad has a total of 64 publications
• A. M. Elaiw has a total of 58 publications
• Liaqat Khan has a total of 54 publications
• Malik Zaka Ullah has a total of 46 publications
• Elsayed Elsayed has a total of 46 publications
• Samy Hassan has a total of 42 publications
• Hassan Zedan has a total of 38 publications
• Marwan Kutbi has a total of 30 publications
• Noura Alshehri has a total of 29 publications
• Hichem Chtioui has a total of 29 publications
• Elzaki Tarig has a total of 27 publications
• Falleh R. Al-Solamy has a total of 26 publications
• Daoud Mashat has a total of 26 publications
• Maryam A Alghamdi has a total of 25 publications
• Mohammad Ismail has a total of 24 publications
• Abdulrahman Al-fhaid has a total of 24 publications
• S. A. Mohiuddine has a total of 22 publications
• Adel Alahmadi has a total of 21 publications
• Saleh Al-Mezel has a total of 20 publications
• Hanan Batarfi has a total of 20 publications
• Saud Alsulami has a total of 17 publications
• Emad Aly has a total of 16 publications
• Abdullah Al-roqi has a total of 14 publications
• Sadah Alkhateeb has a total of 14 publications
• Eman Alaidarous has a total of 13 publications
• Aisha Alshaery has a total of 13 publications
• Ebraheem Alzahrani has a total of 12 publications
• H.O. Bakodah has a total of 11 publications
• Lakhdar Meziani has a total of 11 publications
• Bothayna Kashkari has a total of 10 publications
• Saleh Husseny has a total of 9 publications
• Fatma Al-Sirehy has a total of 8 publications
• Farahat Aly has a total of 8 publications
• Rania A alharbey has a total of 7 publications
• Sarah Al-Sheikh has a total of 7 publications
• Mona Banaja has a total of 7 publications
• Buthinah A. Bin Dehaish has a total of 7 publications
• Enas Elzayat has a total of 6 publications
Even if we assume that the main intention of KAU is to increase its ranking, the agreements are already yielding benefits to faculty members and students at KAU. It is an opportunity for faculty members to discuss their work with prominent scientists and even collaborate together in conducting research projects and publishing papers. It is also an opportunity for postgraduate students to learn from those scientists and attend their lectures and talks. Many of the scientists’ recent projects are funded by KAU and already contributing to the international research community. It is, then, a practice that is commonly used in many international institutions. Why is this a problem for KAU and not for others!
Thank you Prof. Dermitzakis for explaining about the nature of your work, as an adjunct faculty, with KAU. It is good to hear from someone who has a hands-on experience with the issue. I find it quiet strange that Lior did not comment on your reply although he specifically mentioned your name in his post!
Regards,
November 10, 2014 at 6:18 am
Lior Pachter
Thanks for your correcting regarding the publications of Prof. Alotaibi. I made every effort to find them when writing the post but in retrospect erred in searching for his full name. I have corrected the post to reflect this.
I also appreciate your listing of the mathematics faculty at KAU and their number of publications. I am sure that there are some excellent faculty employed by the university, but in my post I was honest in writing that I had never heard of any of the math professors from KAU or their work. This may be due to my ignorance, but as I explained in the post I do review many job applications, listen to seminars etc. in mathematics. It was therefore extremely surprising to me that KAU would rank #7 in the world ahead of MIT. This is not a statement of prejudice against KAU, Saudi Arabia, or its universities.
You defend KAU’s practices by claiming that “It is an opportunity for faculty members to discuss their work with prominent scientists and even collaborate together in conducting research projects and publishing papers” and you write that “t is, then, a practice that is commonly used in many international institutions.” Neither of these statement is true. Among the individuals I mentioned, I found no evidence of any publications with KAU, and it is worth noting that in the case of Dermitzakis he has been visiting KAU for some time. This is a priori surprising, since Dermitzakis has 14 publications already so far just in 2014 (and it is not over yet).
You asked why I did not respond to his email. The answer is that I did not find it necessary to repeat the claims made in my post and beat the matter over the head with a big stick. But since apparently it was not obvious to some, let me repeat:
1. First of all, at least half of Dermitzakis’ citations are from consortium projects. Leaving aside all other matters, how is it reasonable that he be paid for his citations as opposed to other members of these consortia, where he was not even a leading figure (e.g. the mouse genome project)?
2. It is common practice for an author to be added to a paper as a result of funding part of the project. There are ethical concerns with this, but even if one is accepting of the practice, as it is very common, it is important to note that it is *research funding* not *personal funding* that is paid. It would be very different if Dermitzakis were provided a research fund for his efforts to connect with KAU faculty, and indeed such funding might lead to the desired outcome (joint work). As it is, personal funding of highly cited individuals cannot be defended as either necessary or sufficient for real collaboration. It is the institutional equivalent of being paid personally for adding someone to a paper.
3. As I explained in my post, I was horrified to see that KAU went out to hire 1/4 (!) of the highly cited mathematicians on ISI. It seems patently obvious that it was trying to buy a high math ranking, and I think the same is true for the other sciences. Overall KAU has hired >150 adjuncts under its “highly cited researcher program”. With such numbers, it is impossible for me to believe that Dermitzakis specifically or others in the program were brought in to develop real meaningful research collaborations. I gave Carsten Thomassen as a specific example, but in Dermitzakis’ case I am also very familiar with his work, some of it of extremely high quality though dependent on massive data generation with the latest technologies, and I cannot imagine that the missing piece for him was of all palces KAU (or for that matter any of dozens of universities around the world without major molecular biology and genomics programs). It seems clear that he went for the money, a decision I fault him for because it was in support of increasing the university ranking of KAU by a means of purchasing citations/affiliations, rather than real educational and research partnership. I’d like to make clear, that I am certainly not against faculty consulting, serving on scientific boards for money, or in general obtaining financial remuneration for meaningful work. The problem is that in this case there is literally zero evidence that it is meaningful other than Dermitzakis’ defense of it.
4. The matter of women at the KAU conferences Dermitzakis is attending is important to me in the context of what I admonish above. Dermitzakis has publicly stated on social media that he finds it difficult to obtain commitments from women in the conferences he organizes and that one “needs to eliminate the reasons for decline“. I fail to see how attending conferences with zero women speakers (two years in a row) achieves this important goal, one that I care about greatly. To ignore the issue entirely so as to receive the personal payment for adding KAU as an affiliation on ISI seems extremely problematic.
On a final note, you mention that KAU funds numerous research projects with external faculty. I think that is fantastic, and it would be great if the university publicized the $ amount of that funding. If foreign researchers are eager to visit KAU regularly for such funding I completely understand it and will heartily endorse it. It will be fantastic to see KAU researchers as joint authors on high profile papers where they contributed, a process that with time will greatly improve the ranking of the university. But until then, I’ll insist that my colleagues not take personal payments in return for aiding and abetting KAU via a short-cut that games the system (personal cash in return for adding KAU as an adjunct affiliate on ISI).
I hope that clarifies my position.
Sincerely,
Lior
November 10, 2014 at 11:36 am
wasabi
You should look more into the methodology of the ARWU… research and citation metrics are weighted very heavily just as it is in USNews, so your argument about ARWU as an independent validation of KAU’s ranking is pretty poor. If you look at QS or THE rankings, KAU is no where close to being considered an elite program.
I recommend that you read this:
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/secondary-affiliations-lift-king-abdulaziz-university-in-rankings/2014546.article
It has a great reference to a paper who found that KAU is only behind the entire UC system in 2ndary affiliations…
You state: “In fact, most of the publications are written by full-time faculty members at KAU.”
I’m not sure that is true if we are talking about indexed publications…
If we stick to facts, the USNews ranking tells us that KAU has a lot of well cited faculty, many if not all of which are adjunct. Whether this is appropriate or not is up to each person.
November 12, 2014 at 6:48 am
another mathematician
One of those “guest authors” (mentioned in my earlier comment on academic misconduct at KAU) is also in the top half of Haifa Alroqi’s list above. If all of his “publications” are of the same type, their number is rather irrelevant.
November 10, 2014 at 11:19 am
wasabi
It would be interesting to compare the h-index or average citations of KAU faculty versus their adjunct faculty.
Publication counts alone seem pretty problematic…
November 11, 2014 at 5:34 am
Marcus
I think that there is a third story here (the first being the gaming of the ranking by KAU and the second being the gender issue).
When I looked at the linked list of “highly cited mathematicians at Thomson Reuters”, I recognized several names. Of course several of these names were of excellent and well-known mathematicians. However, other names on the list are from people that a few years back I’ve reviewed papers of which were absolute junk. At the time I did some digging and it seems that there is a (now rather large) group of people who publish massive amounts of papers (up to 50 a year or so each) and prolifically cite other people from this group. Most of these papers are utter rubbish (containing mistakes that I would fail an undergraduate for).
This group absolutely floods the system with their junk papers. Not surprisingly, the system can’t cope and some of these rubbish papers end up being published in good journals (of course, most end up in journals controlled by members of the group).
The people from this group who are on the Thomson Reuters list mostly have as secondary affiliation King Abdulaziz University.
So flooding the system with junk can get you $72,000 per year extra.
November 12, 2014 at 9:58 am
vd
Rankings rely heavily on bibliometrics, i.e pure audience measures that completely disregard the scientific substance of the publications. If junk has an audience it will rank high. Quality is only a factor determining audience, PR/networking is another one, perhaps more important, that’s true of other trades and science will be no exception if we keep accepting audience as the pinnacle of achievement. Blaming KAU won’t change this. Advertising their mockery of the toxic ranking craze will.
November 11, 2014 at 11:55 am
Irina Krier
Hi Lior I have been following some of the more political aspects to academia lately and I was wondering whether you had tried to see if a story about how institutions are ranked would have interested people running some data journalism sites. Perhaps it is less academic but nevertheless would be likely to lead to discussion on the topic?
November 12, 2014 at 4:55 am
محمد عابد باخطمه (@profbakhotmah)
1) It is clear in your argument “which basically I respect” that you are mixing cultural and scientific issues (women and mathematics) without logical connection and this is not scientific. NO ONE is interested in the unsolicited opinions of uninvited criticizer/s of their cultural norms, and even if it is seen from freedom of speech perspective, then mathematics is not its arena in which it should be discussed, there is no discipline in mathematics known as feminism, I think your reasoning was taken over by your ego, you should be unbiased and serious as the issue of “buying citation” deserves.
2)As if that is not enough, you Introduced a sensitive political ,religious, controversial issues in the argument when mentioning Osama Binladin and by doing so you make things distastefully inappropriate and that is not funny!!!
I am not afraid to discuss in this forum the cultural, religious or political issues regarding my culture and its history, after all from the heritage of this culture you had the chance to be a mathematician, be realistic the numbers you are using are called ARABIC NUMBERS and you know ‘or you supposed to know’ the history of the development of algebra and trigonometry.
You can visit @mbinabid https://twitter.com/mbinabid/status/357921308341846016 or profmbinabid on YouTube channel if you are interested and not afraid from intercultural dialogue
2) You accused a person that he has zero publication!!!??
Now….because of 1-3 it is mandatory to make it clear beyond any doubt that you are not attacking KAU because of unfruitful events with it….have you requested and/or recommended to affiliation and the request denied or the recommendation ignored? And/or any relation with KAUST?
I WILL ASSUME THE ANSWER IS NEGATIVE… and continue to say:-
after removing the noisy echoes from your argument and therefore disabling it’s banality and by subtracting the effect of the superimposed graphics from its content we can discuss the real issue “paying for citation” but I will discuss it in a decent way using no vulgar jocks or indecent words because I admire scientific discussions and certainly without revolutionary heroic preacher attitudes of trying to change the believes of a closed society from inside, because I respect the norms of any human society no matter how deferent from me they are and regardless of my disagreement to it, I do not make myself a preacher or accept a tricky one to change my values leave alone challenging it.
Paying money by itself is not a matter of discussion, the only reason why we have money is to pay it…..what to have in return is the dilemma because morality codes ,legality laws and ethical principles must be considered ,if one is allowed to pay for anything he can pay for just because he find someone who has what he desire and accepting the money then human trafficking and slavery not to be condemned spying is to be promoted ,child pornography to be allowed and it will be OK to have brand names for brothel chains.
To conclude a sensible attitude towards “paying for citation” we need to define “citation” and in our contest it means ( the act of citing or quoting a reference to an authority or a precedent) or KAU pay to X person in return he confirm that his published scientific work accomplished in association with KAU …….so far so good, but in a world without “devils” who usually hide in the details, we need to know the nature of this association ,OK, the nature of the association is affiliation ,OK, who is affiliated to whom? The X person to KAU or vice versa? The answer will uncover the devil!!!! In other word we know the tool “citation” of harvesting the fruit “reputation” ,but we need to know the tree , is it KAU tree and the X person is the branch carrying the fruit or the tree is the X person and KAU is the branch?!. Because a branch is an affiliate to the tree and a tree cannot be logically described as an affiliate to branches….one should expect the KAU is the tree holding the X person, supporting, nourishing , nursing ,protecting…etc and without KAU the X person is nothing more than a piece of wood unless it will be grown as another tree…..the fact in reality is completely diverged from the normal understanding of affiliation… the X person is the tree and KAU is the branch, so the association is not affiliation…. It is incorrectly and intentionally described as such.. the motive for this “can at least be described as half truth” is to have reputation that KAU is one of the best in the world among its peers, in my opinion we have 2 major vices here (sloth on part of KAU and gluttony on the part of X person) cooperating to conspire against the virtue of truth using greed and pride as tools>>>and I know by saying that I will be accused by having envious feelings!!!, to me it looks like KAU wants to live a lavish luxurious life just because it have money and some are prepared to take money to put its name on the product he produce but just the name not anything else … looks like a good deal by all pragmatic parameters …BUT, unacceptable by any of the noble standards. Or KAU preferred buying fish (regardless its quality and freshness) and not to learn fishing even it have highly professional fishermen. Why a rich gentleman buy large quantity of fish regardless its meat quality or even freshness? A question only the buyer can answer, but, if someone assumed parascientific reasons he will be having a creditable point of view, some gentlemen put immediate gains before strategic benefits.
Acquiring praise for what one did not do is wrong in my value system and taking the good deeds of others and credit it to my account is a shameful behavior in my standards and according to our culture moral codes it is a sin {And never think that those who rejoice in what they have perpetrated and like to be praised for what they did not do – never think them [to be] in safety from the punishment, and for them is a painful punishment.} Quran verse 188 surat ALimmran http://quran.com/3/188
Furthermore it is a sin to commit a bad deed and accused an innocent with it {But whoever earns an offense or a sin and then blames it on an innocent [person] has taken upon himself a slander and manifest sin.} Quran vers 112 surat al nisaa “NIssa means women!!!!” http://quran.com/4/112
also one has to avoid the doubtful deeds to protect his honor [“The lawful is clear and the unlawful is clear, and between that are matters that are doubtful (not clear); many of the people do not know whether it is lawful or unlawful. So whoever leaves it to protect his religion and his honor, then he will be safe, and whoever falls into something from them, then he soon will have fallen into the unlawful. Just like if someone grazes (his animals) around a sanctuary, he would soon wind up in it. Indeed for every king is a sanctuary (pasture), and indeed Allah’s sanctuary is what He made unlawful.”] hadeeth from Profit sayings http://sunnah.com/tirmidhi/14/1 …..So it is clear in my mind the stand towards the “business of paying for citation” and I have explained my reasons to denounce it as is practiced in KAU now and the evidence is the published contract.
Before closing I think it is important to make sure that we agree on what is” KAU”?/. From conceptual point of view KAU is a university that every dean of collage or auxiliary deanship, chairman of all scientific department, high executives in administration is appointed by the president of the university. None of the above is by elections so whatever decided in KAU is not reflecting the general opinion of the scientist in it, but represent the goodwill of the management board chaired by the president, and this is important because I think it is rather important to be known that it is not known by statistics and “P values” that the university “ the community for the higher education” agree on the issue that involves how to spend millions of riyals particularly when it involves paying 22000 riyals for 12 months for a person who comes for 3 weeks and treated as VIP just to put KAU in his publication and repeating this for 100 times so the university rank will be augmented, actually I am not sure they will agree on it knowing that a professor basic salary start at 18000 thousand riyals per month it means that in 3 weeks per year an affiliate will take what a full time professor have in 15 months it looks very expensive price for augmentation plastic surgery!!!!, not only that but the X person is in the driver seat not KAU , further more his Excellency the X person will come as luxurious traveler and stay in 5 stars hotel for 3 weeks while a university professor is struggling to save for a budget holiday with his family in addition to school fees housing rentals….etc or have to go through laborious bureaucratic process to go for meeting or present a paper a lot travel on their Owen expense and pray they will not be disciplinary questioned!!! the 22000 riyals given to affiliate per month is what some receive as a housing allowance for about 6 months>>> the Saudi security employee in the university receive 2500 riyals per month it means one affiliate takes per year what is paid to support 22 Saudi families per year in the community KAU serves, PLEASE do not think that the opinion of a community of Saudi scientist for higher education been consulted and agreed on this behavior of lavish spending because they know and admire generosity but do not support prodigal expenditures or like extravagance hospitality .I hope you formed a concept about KAU now
I don’t blame you or the one who pokes dirty jocks or who wants to change our closed society or who wants to get ready easy money and fancy presents for a line contains characters less than in a tweet or denounce Saudi Arabian culture and scientist , why should I? But who gave all the above the reason to do so against our ethical principles and moral codes is to be blamed and hopefully hold accountable to it.
Finally how about an experiment? Random number of Saudi scientist and American ones exchange their working environment (something like house swap TV show) only then we will have a better idea who has a cleverer brain and scientific fitness …..then management s swab when scientist go to their original environment before the swab so effect of managers on the clovers can be evaluated….. some managers have a concept of science not present in known dictionaries to my knowledge which of course can be wrong.
And thank you for letting me know about what is happening in KAU and KAUST>>please keep us updated!!
Mohamad Bakhotmah
Prof.of biliary surgery
KAU Jeddah
November 12, 2014 at 6:04 am
Lior Pachter
Dear Prof. Bakhotmah,
I appreciate your thoughtful reply and appreciate your candor in criticizing the practice of KAU that I highlighted in my post.
To answer your questions: you are right, as you assumed, that I do not have right now, nor have had in the past any professional or personal relationships to KAU, KAUST or other Saudi Arabian universities (in the interests of full disclosure I do know at least one faculty member at KAUST who is a former professor of mine; a mentioned the fact because having never heard of KAU I googled it and that was the only name that I recognized under “notable alumni” (on the wikipedia page). Please know that my criticism of the practice of western scientists accepting KAU money was not intended to be a denigration of everything associated with KAU (the people who work there, the country etc.). Finally, as for issue #1, it is my personal opinion that on the specific matter of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) there is a huge gap that must be bridged across the world (not only in your country but everywhere), and as I explained in my post attending or organizing conferences with zero women speakers contributes to the problem. For example, I hold people from Switzerland (where Dermitzakis teaches), the USA (where Huelsenbeck teaches) and China (where Wang teaches) to the same expectation on this matter. I believe that it makes sense to mention women in STEM in the context of the KAU situation because of the hypocrisy it exposes in some of the *western* scientists involved.
November 13, 2014 at 11:41 am
محمد عابد باخطمه (@profbakhotmah)
Dear Prof Pachter
thank you for prompt respond
my apology for delay
it was great opportunity to exchange point views
I wish that scientist review the organizational policy of institutions before cooperating with it,by doing so scientist will be sure that their science is used for what it suppose to serve without abuse.
since we have mutual understanding about the core issue we can “chat” about the women issue and this what I think
1)ladies are excellent in winning so let them fight their Owen battle they will end victorious lets not underestimate the hardness strength and power of “DIAMONDS” and we have only to ensure objectivity and be ware from subjectivity
2)nature is fair on making us male and females its not only for reproduction its far mor than that,men and women are complementary not competitive like eye sight and ear hearing sometimes one seems rudimentary and the other vital in fact they are booth equally important (eye in art gallery , ear in concert and booth on the beach at sunset)
3) our ( men and women) brains wired differently so why fix a not broken nature!?
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763413003011
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/2/823.full
have a nice day
it was nice to talk to you
Regards
April 13, 2015 at 12:30 pm
Rena
Arabic numerals were developed by Hindus in India and appropriated by Arabs.
November 13, 2014 at 5:09 pm
AK
Boy, these comments are even more revealing than the original post by Lior.
November 14, 2014 at 9:44 am
Ising Model
I got one of these invitations from King Abdulaziz University too and I said “No” to it. Good thing I said “No”, otherwise I would be criticized by Lior here.
But believe me, the offer of $72K “easy money” even made me think for a minute or two before saying “No”. It was tempting! Some people have children to send to school, and their salaries are not enough.
November 14, 2014 at 10:14 am
Lior Pachter
If I may ask, why did you say no?
November 14, 2014 at 12:01 pm
Ising Model
I thought it was not ethically correct
November 16, 2014 at 5:50 am
Truth hurts
I do not why you avoid to talk about eminent scientists who signed such contracts and they are very numerous. Now if you consider that what KAU is doing in unethical, then what these scientists have done is even worse. It is a kind of prostitution. Contrary to what it has been said, the majority of the ISI highly cited scientists did never show up, now you can ask why the number of published ISI papers of the local faculty members has increased, just have a look at the coauthored papers of locals with highly cited guys. you will get the answer.by the way, this program has been stopped for one year in KAU and KSU just after the famous paper by nature, but things got even worse after. There is a wild battle between saudi universities
November 16, 2014 at 12:17 pm
Ising Model
I see your point and I agree with you. As I said before personally I said “No” to the offer of King Abdulaziz University, although the easy money was tempting. Personally, I felt that accepting KAU offer was “unethical”.
However I do not feel that I can judge others. May be others have children that they want to school and their salaries are not enough? May be they are under severe financial constraints due to medical expenses, etc.? Who knows? It is easy to judge others when our bellies are full and our houses are warm.
Here I differ from Lior. Although I mostly agree with his opinion, I do not feel that I can judge others. Doing so in my mind is against liberalism.
November 16, 2014 at 12:28 pm
Nick
“Although I mostly agree with his opinion, I do not feel that I can judge others. Doing so in my mind is against liberalism.”
So…the KKK? No comments on them? That’s liberalism to you?
November 16, 2014 at 10:11 pm
Ising Model
In my mind, the KKK members need hospitalization and psychological treatment. I think most of them have had miserable childhoods, and in this light are not healthy. Nobody can be so much full of hatred without serious psychological illness.
November 19, 2014 at 12:17 am
محمد عابد باخطمه (@profbakhotmah)
Dear Ising Model
may I ask you please to publish here the invitation from KAU
also I appreciate and encourage others to do so
November 19, 2014 at 6:34 am
Marc RobinsonRechavi (@marc_rr)
Plant biologist Sophien Kamoun has tweeted the letter that he received from KSU, another Saudi university:
November 19, 2014 at 1:31 pm
Lior Pachter
The list of those who did enroll in the “Distinguished Scientist Fellowship Program” at King Saud University is here:
http://dsfp.ksu.edu.sa/content/researchers
November 19, 2014 at 4:39 pm
Sophien Kamoun
November 19, 2014 at 10:12 pm
محمد عابد باخطمه (@profbakhotmah)
THANK YOU VERY MUCH INDEED
transparency is the best antivenom to malscientific poisonous practices
Thank you
November 20, 2014 at 1:47 am
Nick Schurch
[Is it] the green-ey’d monster, which doth mock
The meat it feeds on. That cuckold lives in bliss,
Who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger:
But O, what damnèd minutes tells he o’er
Who dotes, yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves!
Othello Act 3, scene 3, 165–171
November 26, 2014 at 3:41 am
Truth hurts
I insist that it is unethical, let me give an example, Theodore Simos is affiliated with King Saud University for 4 years now. He has now a couple of papers with his Saudi Host Ibrahim Olayan. The latter had a very poor record before 2011. Now he has many ISI coauthored papers with simos, and this enabled him. Note that in all saudi universities a faculty member is promoted if he has a number of ISI accepted papers. Note also that Highly ISI Reserchers are only allowed to mentor Saudi Faculty members……..who can conclude??
December 9, 2014 at 5:05 am
solutionbuilders
I thinking thomson and reuter is a game nothing else and KAU played it well as mentioned in this post http://abdullahyousafzai.blogspot.com/2014/12/ethics-ranking-and-games-in-research.html
December 17, 2014 at 10:54 pm
Dr. Back
I think King Said University doing worse practices. They made Fake Full Time employment of Highly cited scietitists. This report is full with examples
http://www.google.com.sa/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CCMQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fsciencewatch.com%2Fsites%2Fsw%2Ffiles%2Fsw-article%2Fmedia%2Fworlds-most-influential-scientific-minds-2014.pdf&ei=YmqSVLT-OOS_ywPi5YKoCQ&usg=AFQjCNEnGNfIdAineRp1nfq023_pRcMdBw
December 17, 2014 at 11:03 pm
Dr. Back
Can the auther ask any scientist in the report with full time affiliation at King Saud University, why are they declare Fake employment status.
Is there any reason to mention only KAU !!
January 12, 2015 at 10:54 pm
Math
Do you think it is any coincidence that the infamous Mohamed El Naschie of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals fame seems to have been involved with KAU?
January 13, 2015 at 12:00 am
Lior Pachter
I think he was involved (or claimed to be involved) with King Saud University, specifically with the King Abdullah Al Saud Institute of Nano & Advanced Technologies. Thanks for pointing this out- I wasn’t aware of the connection until now.
January 13, 2015 at 7:47 am
Math
On his website he claims to be an “advisor of the Ministry of Science and Technology of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia”. He is also a serial con artist so nothing on his website (especially affiliations) should be taken as truth.
February 19, 2015 at 3:02 pm
isomorphismes
Regarding your paper with Peter Huggins: _The Economist_’s “Which MBA?” website allows students to re-weight the importance levels of the magazine’s findings.
It also occurs to me that those weighting schemes are the perfect way of explaining what is a covector, at least to the kind of person who felt frustrated that _USNWR_ chose a specific weighting scheme that they might not agree with.
Finally, implementing something like what _The Economist_ did should be fairly easy with RStudio’s recent progress on Shiny.
March 1, 2015 at 8:14 am
CUNG CHIANG PROFESSOR
MANY UNIVERSITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST INCLUDING TURKEY ARE PURCHASING UNETHICAL RESEARCH FROM AUTHORS WORKING IN OTHER COUNTRIES TO INCREASE THEIR SO CALLED RANKING. KING ABDUL AZIZ UNIV., KING SAUD UNIV., CHANKAYA UNIVERSITY, ATILIM UNIVERSITY ANKARA TURKEY ARE FEW NAMES WHICH ARE INVOLVED IN THIS KIND OF PRACTICE.
March 1, 2015 at 8:21 am
AHMED YASAR
UNFORTUNATELY THESE UNIVERSITIES ARE UNETHICALLY BUSY IN MAKING THEIR SO CALLED RANKING TO ATTRACT MORE STUDENT BY MAKING THIS ILLUSION OF FAKE RESEARCH. SHAME ON SUCH SO CALLED UNIVERSITIES AND SOP CALLED ACADEMICS! BECAUSE OF FEW BLACK SHEEPS WHOLE COMMUNITY SUFFERS!
March 24, 2015 at 3:04 pm
CLim
Here’s a thought. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute awards research grants and investigatorships for individuals who carry out their research work in various host institutions. This model appears similar to what KAU is doing, albeit at different scales.
August 19, 2015 at 4:51 am
Lior Pachter
KAU continues to shine. In the latest ARWU mathematics rankings KAU is ranked #6 ahead of schools such as MIT, Oxford, Cambridge and UCLA.
August 19, 2015 at 5:15 am
Haifa Alroqi
Let it shine! Why is it bothering you?
May 22, 2017 at 10:55 am
Math thinker
I totally agree with your article Lior; and I can add the following: basically what is happening out there is just under-the-table secret deals, when everyone from inside and outside (who accepts to get involved with) the KAU math department is in a win-win situation.
The real problem with the ranking process is the lack of a strong criteria. Publishing a lot of papers does not necessarily reflect the true level of higher education out there.
I believe it is a job of the entire mathematical community around the world to protect the dignity of mathematical knowledge, and never leave it a victim of such a behavior when the argue of earning recognition and promotion comes prior to the ethic of research!
I think we need a global movement to address this issue, otherwise we will see a lot of these sad scenarios in the future again and again in different parts of the world!
PS: Have you considered to contact the students (not the staff) at the KAU math department? I believe you will find a lot of interesting stories which will boggle your mind!
August 29, 2020 at 9:23 am
Mohammed Oranos
Each Researcher is free to give his affiliation to the University he wants!
In addition, the ranking of universities is purely commercial! How to explain that a football player earns a lot of money and a great researcher lives in shit!
In some countries, teachers earn $ 500 less from me.
I ask those who criticize poor researchers to be quiet.
End
March 6, 2021 at 10:27 pm
SK
I realize that I am joining this conversation more than half-a-decade late, so I apologize in advance if my comments are presently considered to be regarding a dead letter. But I truly feel compelled to ask not just Professor Pachter, but also any other commentators who might feel compelled to reply, the following questions:
1) What exactly is the problem with what KAU is doing, if there indeed is a problem at all? (Note, the question is not whether there may be a problem with what Saudi Arabia may be doing, but rather with what KAU *specifically* is doing.)
2) If there is indeed a problem with what KAU is doing, then, realistically, what should they be doing instead? (To reiterate, the crux of the matter is that whatever you propose must be both *realistic* and also within the power of KAU, as opposed to within the power of the government of Saudi Arabia or some other entity)
Allow me to reply to some of the points made both in the original blog post and in some of the comments
>>it seems highly inappropriate for a faculty member to list an affiliation on a paper to an institution to which they have no scientific connection whatsoever. <>First, as the mathematics example shows, KAU has been paying a very large number of mathematicians who could not, even if they wanted to, have any meaningful collaboration with KAU. Until two years ago KAU did not have a graduate program. Consider for example that they “hired” Elias Stein from Princeton. Did he sign the contract intending to work with undergraduates at KAU on research collaborations? The idea is completely preposterous. Furthermore, the vast number of “distinguished adjunct professors” they have hired (the title itself is ridiculous) proves that there couldn’t have been a serious intention to form serious collaborative relationships with them.<<
Alright, so now the goalposts have been moved. The crux of the issue is not whether the KAU visiting faculty in question truly have "no scientific connection whatsoever" to KAU (because they most certainly do have a scientific connection), but rather whether the KAU scientific connection is sufficiently substantial *enough* that KAU deserves affiliation credit from publications produced from those adjunct faculty. Now we’re getting to brass tacks.
First of all, it should be noted that KAU is not requiring that *every* publication from those visiting faculty include a KAU affiliation. KAU is requiring such affiliation for only *some* publications, and presumably that would entail those particular publications that are actually borne from the collaboration with KAU. Is that really so unfair? If those faculty are publishing other papers that have nothing to do with KAU, those faculty are perfectly free to exclude their KAU affiliation from those papers.
Besides, as other commentators have already pointed out, right now there are plenty of professors in the West who have multiple affiliations with various Western universities. And I have no doubt that many of those universities require, or at least strongly pressure, those affiliate faculty to publish papers that explicitly state their affiliation (or else have the affiliation terminated). If those Western universities can do that, why can't KAU do likewise?
Or perhaps the real (if unstated) problem is that the KAU visiting faculty are not required to do many of the other responsibilities that faculty often times have: required teaching, attending monthly research seminars, attending administrative meetings, etc. However again, I think it ought to be noted that plenty of tenured faculty at Western universities frankly, don't engage in those activities either, nor are they required to do so. For example, Harvard famously granted Robert Burns Woodward the title of the Donner Professor of Science which explicitly liberated Woodward from any required teaching whatsoever, thereby allowing Woodward to dedicate all of his time to research. (And indeed the world probably benefits from having an ingenious researcher such as Woodward in devoting all of his time to research.) Similarly, a lot of tenured faculty at Western universities don't exactly have stellar attendance records in the research seminars or the administrative meetings.
I also think the following point needs to be re-emphasized: the KAU visiting faculty are just *visiting* faculty. I thought it was well understood that visiting faculty at any university wouldn't necessarily engage in all of the full-time faculty activities at that university, nor would anybody expect them to do so.
Regarding the KAU hiring of the late Elias Stein, I obviously don’t know the particulars of the arrangement and I doubt that anybody else here does either. Given that, why must we automatically assume the worst? Let’s say that KAU did indeed – as you mockingly sneered – hire Stein to establish research collaborations with some of KAU’s undergraduates. But why must that arrangement necessarily be the subject of contempt? Sure, Stein’s mathematics knowledge was obviously so vastly greater than that of the undergrads that no important mathematical research will ever be directly produced from such a collaboration. Yet perhaps the real goal was not to directly produce important new mathematics knowledge, but actually to *inspire* students to want to know more about mathematics. For example, perhaps Stein helped some KAU undergrads to write some very simple math research articles that might be publishable in an undergraduate math journal. Again, the point would not be that those undergrads would be publishing important mathematical discoveries, but rather simply to inspire their appreciation of mathematics. For the rest of their lives, those students will remember and treasure the time that they spent with Stein. Some of them might dedicate themselves to learning more math such that they can actually understand Stein’s award-winning research. And perhaps – just perhaps – a few of them might be so inspired so as to become mathematicians themselves. Would that be such a bad thing?
And even if all of that fails – even if none of the students are inspired by Stein – well, at least KAU tried. Would that be such a bad thing? Should KAU not even try?
*Second, KAU explicitly asked participants to amend their ISI profile. This is a highly unusual request. To ask them to do so upfront for the money is the institutional equivalent to asking someone to add you as a coauthor on their paper so you can improve your citation count or h-index. Sure, some people basically do that in round about ways (e.g. PIs paying for part of some project so they can be coauthors on it) but even then, they might pay for the *research*, not give some professors a personal cheque.*
But is it really such an unusual request? I am not sure that it is any more unusual than, say, a university requiring (or at least very strongly suggesting, on pain of angering the senior faculty) that new junior faculty who are hired right out of a PhD program or postdoc to immediately switch their affiliation to their new employer, even regarding research for which almost all of the work had already been completed in said PhD program or postdoc. Yet this happens all the time.
Indeed, it seems to me that plenty of Western universities strongly prefer to hire – for lack of a better term – scholars that are ‘publication-pregnant’. That is to say, those universities prefer to hire those scholars who clearly have plenty of highly publishable work in the pipeline but which hasn’t actually been formally published quite just yet, so that when they finally do ‘deliver’ those publications, the university will instantly receive the publishing credit.
*Although one can criticize many aspects of KAUST, I do think that hiring world-class faculty there indicates a serious intention to create real science in Saudi Arabia. That’s great. But it is not at all what has been happening with the vast number of “distinguished adjunct professors” at KAU.
*
But that gets to the other issue that I posed: realistically, what else is KAU supposed to do? I mean no offense to Saudi Arabia when I say this, but I would surmise that most top Western-trained researchers are not exactly keen to uproot themselves and their families to move to Saudi Arabia in order to become full-time KAU faculty. Nor – at least right now – does Saudi Arabia seem to have enough of its own citizenry who are top researchers that could fill the KAU full-time faculty ranks. Furthermore, any Saudi citizen who actually does manage to become a top researcher would surely be poached away with a tenured and comfortable faculty offer from a prestigious Western university.
Hence, while I have noticed that you continually denigrate KAU’s hiring of large numbers of distinguished adjunct faculty as not being indicative of a serious intention of creating real science in Saudi Arabia, I have also noticed that you conspicuously never proposed an alternative plan that KAU could realistically execute. It’s easy for a professor at eminent research universities such as Caltech or Berkeley with well-established research cultures that have been cultivated over many generations to sit haughtily on his high perch and sternly lecture KAU for not being a strong research university. But KAU has to start somewhere, right?
* Sixth, the fact that KAU has separate campuses for women and men. And that the genomics conference I mentioned has had no women for two years running matters and is part of the conversation…Eighth, I am surprised that hardly anyone has commented on the fact that out of hundreds of faculty being paid off, there are maybe one or two women. *
Like other commentators have already stated, I too believe that the issue of sexism is an entirely separate matter that only serves to muddle the conversation regarding KAU’s research affiliation and citation.
But moreover, even for those of you who continue to insist that the actions in question are indeed sexist, it is far from clear to me that KAU specifically is in a position to do much about it. While I fully recognize that Saudi Arabia has recently undergone immense changes regarding women’s rights, at the time (in the year 2014) of the writing of this original blog posting, Saudi Arabia still strongly enforced gender segregation within both its education system and in its workforce. Hence, any woman faculty who was offered a KAU adjunct faculty position would therefore only legally be able to interact with KAU female students. Furthermore, those KAU female students (back in 2014) were legally barred from many professional careers in Saudi Arabia. Hence, KAU might well have decided that, given the laws of Saudi Arabia at the time, it would be entirely rational to preferentially invest in enhancing the human capital of their male students, because it is those male students that would actually be able to fully utilize their enhanced human capital in their careers. Hence, according to that logic, KAU should therefore bring in only adjunct faculty who are men.
Similarly, back in 2014, most conferences held in Saudi Arabia (just like, frankly, most of public society in Saudi Arabia) were male-only. KAU’s genomics conference is hardly unique in that respect. If KAU had invited a woman speaker to the genomics conference, KAU would likely have then needed to host a ‘separate’ sub-conference just for that speaker and the women attendees, with all of the logistical problems that that entails.
{Note, to be clear, I am not defending the government of Saudi Arabia’s gender affairs. I am simply saying that I can understand why KAU would undertake the decisions that it did. KAU is presumably in no position to actually *change* government policy. Nor does Saudi Arabia, like most non-Western nations, have a well-established policy of academic freedom. Hence, any attempts by KAU to reform government policy might very well have been greeted by a shutdown of the university. One must keep in mind what KAU is realistically able to do, given its strictures.}