Hey, here’s some free money for you! Just lend your name to this university and they’ll pay you $1000 for every article you publish!

Remember that absolutely ridiculous claim that scientific citations are worth $100,000 each?

It appears that someone is taking this literally. Or, nearly so. Nick Wise has the story:

A couple of months ago a professor received the following email, which they forwarded to me.

Dear esteemed colleagues,

We are delighted to extend an invitation to apply for our prestigious remote research fellowships at the University of Religions and Denominations (URD) . . . These fellowships offer substantial financial support to researchers with papers currently in press, accepted or under review by Scopus-indexed journals. . . .

Fellowship Type: Remote Short-term Research Fellowship. . . .

Affiliation: Encouragement for researchers to acknowledge URD as their additional affiliation in published articles.

Remuneration: Project-based compensation for each research article.

Payment Range: Up to $1000 USD per article (based on SJR journal ranking). . . .

Why would the institution pay researchers to say that they are affiliated with them? It could be that funding for the university is related to the number of papers published in indexed journals. More articles associated with the university can also improve their placing in national or international university rankings, which could lead directly to more funding, or to more students wanting to attend and bringing in more money.

The University of Religions and Denominations is a private Iranian university . . . Until recently the institution had very few published papers associated with it . . . and their subject matter was all related to religion. . . . However, last year there was a substantial increase to 103 published papers, and so far this year there are already 35. This suggests that some academics have taken them up on the offer in the advert to include URD as an affiliation.

Surbhi Bhatia Khan is a lecturer in data science at the University of Salford in the UK since March 2023 and a top 2% scientist in the world according to Stanford University’s rankings. She published 29 research articles last year according to Dimensions, an impressive output, in which she was primarily affiliated to the University of Salford. In addition though, 5 of those submitted in the 2nd half of last year had an additional affiliation at the Department of Engineering and Environment at URD, which is not listed as one of the departments on the university website. Additionally, 19 of the 29 state that she’s affiliated to the Lebanese American University in Beirut, which she was not affiliated with before 2023. She is yet to mention her role at either of these additional affiliations on her LinkedIn profile.

Looking at the Lebanese American University, another private university, its publication numbers have shot up from 201 in 2015 to 503 in 2021 and 2,842 in 2023, according to Dimensions. So far in 2024 they have published 525, on track for over 6,000 publications for the year. By contrast, according to the university website, the faculty consisted of 547 full-time staff members in 2021 but had shrunk to 423 in 2023. It is hard to imagine how such growth in publication numbers could occur without a similar growth in the faculty, let alone with a reduction.

Wise writes:

How many other institutions are seeing incredible increases in publication numbers? Last year we saw gaming of the system on a grand scale by various Saudi Arabian universities, but how many offers like the one above are going around, whether by email or sent through Whatsapp groups or similar?

It’s bad news when universities in England, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon start imitating the corrupt citation practices that we have previously associated with nearby Cornell University.

But I can see where Dr. Khan is coming from: if someone’s gonna send you free money, why not take it? Even if the “someone” is a University of Religions and Denominations, and none of your published research relates to religion, and you list an affiliation with an apparently nonexistent department.

The only thing that’s bugging me is that, according to an esteemed professor at Northeastern University, citations are worth $100,000 each—indeed, we are told that it is possible to calculate “exactly how much a single citation is worth.” In that case, Dr. Khan is getting ripped off by University of Religions and Denominations, who are offering a paltry “up to $1000”—and that’s per article, not per citation! I know about transaction costs etc. but maybe she could at least negotiate them up to $2000 per.

I can’t imagine this scam going on for long, but while it lasts you might as well get in on it. Why should professors at Salford University have all the fun?

Parting advice

Just one piece of advice for anyone who’s read this far down into the post: if you apply for the “Remote Short-term Research Fellowship” and you get it, and you send them the publication notice for your article that includes your affiliation with the university, and then they tell you that they’ll be happy to send you a check for $1000, you just have to wire them a $10 processing fee . . . don’t do it!!!