One of the world's most cited scientists, Rafael Luque, suspended, publishes a study every 37 hours

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

One of the world’s most cited scientists, Rafael Luque, suspended without pay for 13 years

One of the most cited scientists in the world, the Spanish chemist Rafael Luque, has been suspended without pay for the next 13 years, according to Luque himself and the institution where he worked until recently, the University of Córdoba, in Spain. The university has sanctioned Luque for signing his studies as a researcher at other centers, such as King Saud University in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia) and the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia in Moscow, despite having a full-time civil servant contract with the Spanish institution.

Luque, born in Córdoba 44 years ago, is one of the most prolific scientists in Spain. He has published some 700 studies, mainly in the field of so-called green chemistry, which tries to synthesize products, such as drugs and fuels, while generating less waste. So far this year, Luque has already published 58 studies, one every 37 hours. The chemist has been on the list of the world’s most cited researchers for five years, compiled by the specialized company Clarivate. Institutions all over the world fight to hire scientists like Luque, since one of them alone can move a center up hundreds of positions in international academic rankings, such as the influential Shanghai ranking, attracting more students and more tuition money. “Without me the University of Córdoba is going to drop 300 spots. They have shot themselves in the foot,” said Luque, who attributed the sanction to “pure envy.”

Over a decade ago, leading Saudi universities launched aggressive programs to recruit the world’s most cited scientists. The King Abdulaziz University, for example, began to offer them around 70,000 euros ($76,000) per year, on the condition that they spend just one week a year on its campus and, of course, add the name of the Saudi institution to the signature of the studies, as revealed by the magazine Science.



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Luque is constantly publishing studies, each time quicker than the last. Last year he signed some 110 articles. In the first quarter of 2023, he has already published 58. The chemist admitted that since December he has been using the artificial intelligence program ChatGPT to “polish” his texts. “These months have been quite productive, because there are articles for which I used to need two or three days, and now I do them in one day,” he said. ChatGPT, launched in December, is capable of generating in-depth texts in response to complex questions. Luque said he basically uses it to improve his written expression in English and strongly denies having any relationship with any wholesale research factory.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/one-of-the-world-s-most-cited-scientists-rafael-luque-suspended-without-pay-for-13-years/ar-AA19nOOW

[Phoenix61]

1. Geez, what an ego. Seems he decided he didn't have to

follow the rules and the college decided he did.

[Effete Snob]

2. Yep

[stopdiggin]

5. prolific in this case seems a misnomer

nobody is doing this much work simultaneously - which means there's a lot of credit being claimed ....
(and some pretty casual ethics, somewhere in the pipeline .. ?)

[dalton99a]

3. "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with a firehose of bullshit."

The current scientific system is governed by the “publish or perish” imperative. Researchers are evaluated by the number of studies they publish in peer-reviewed journals and by the number of times these papers are cited by other colleagues. The well-intentioned mechanism, however, has had perverse effects, as explained by the British engineer Nick Wise, a researcher at Cambridge University who, in his spare time, looks for fraud in science. Wise has uncovered shady “factories of scientific studies”, elaborated with clippers and automatic text generators, and whose authorship is secretly sold for hundreds or thousands of euros, to inflate resumes. “I found a study by Rafael Luque whose authorship had previously been offered in a group on [the messaging platform] Telegram,” Wise said.

The Spanish researcher published five months ago the article under suspicion, on the degradation of ibuprofen in wastewater, with six co-authors from the University of Bushehr and another one from the University of Tabriz, both in Iran. Luque assures that he has never paid to sign on someone else’s study, but added that he does not know all the Iranian co-authors listed on the study and does not rule out that some of them did pay to appear. “I obviously don’t know that, but I’m amazed by this issue. Who pays to publish a study? Someone who needs it, maybe, I don’t know,” he said by videoconference from Dhahran, the heart of the Saudi oil industry, where he might start collaborating with a local university.

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

4. In the time you posted that, Luque published another study

[live love laugh]

6. LOL