Are researchers and universities interested in being included in a new ranking scheme? No problem, just pay some cash.
A nuclear engineer at North Carolina State University says this year has seen a rise in news stories from Bangladesh, Kashmir, and Nigeria. The lack of knowledge about rankings at universities and the media in certain countries is what causes these to come to light.
The AD Scientific Index charges $30 for an individual researcher to be included in the ranking and an amount for institutions to be ranked.
That is not normal for a ranking. Times Higher Education does not charge universities for being listed. Such rankings have fallen under scrutiny.
Kyle Siler, a meta-science researcher at the University of Montreal in Quebec, Canada, has previously written about predatory publishing. This is a new innovation.
Some researchers tend to make a lot of money out of the rankings, according to a physicist at the University of Rajshahi in Bangladesh. Naqib said that the rankings have been widely reported in newspapers and promoted on social media.
Naqib says rankings become the primary focus in places that don't have a mature research culture or a strong focus on ethical research. He said that if you don't really understand the bibliographic indices you are in trouble.
On their website, AD Scientific states that it bases its ranking on nine undisclosed parameters but it is not clear what those are.
The methodology of the AD Scientific Index has not been explained in any peer-reviewed studies.
Both Naqib and Siler had the same concerns. Siler says the rankings are not well done. They are using a search engine. There isn't a lot of thought put into this.
Retraction Watch reached out to the co-founders of the AD Scientific Index, but didn't hear back.
News outlets in the country aren't giving enough scrutiny to the index's figures before reporting them and universities are also promoting the index when it favors them. They don't know what's in the black box.
Siler says university press offices are pushing these sorts of rankings. He says it is easy for them. The public likes horse races. The public likes to compete. The average reader doesn't understand how complex universities are.
Promoting scientists without scrutiny may have consequences when it comes to allocating funding. Naqib agrees that this is a legitimate concern since policymakers are becoming more interested in these sorts of rankings. Naqib thinks it will influence funding allocation. Policymakers don't have that kind of understanding. It is very easy to manipulate them.
Siler thinks that the AD Scientific Index might become the defacto ranking in a lot of the developing world.
Siler notes that measuring quality is difficult. I don't have a problem with measuring quality with intellectual humility and the necessary caveat that you're trying to quantify a very qualitative thing. Universities are complex and can't be boiled down to a single number.
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Yves Gingras is the Canada Research Chair in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Quebec in Montreal. He should know that in 1997 he founded the Observatoire des sciences et des technologies.
November 8, 2016
Ask for a watch.
An open letter to the Serbian science ministry and an accompanying petition signed by 850 scientists makes for a dim reading on the state of research ethics in Serbia. The systematic and apparently state-endorsed practice of...
December 17, 2012
In the book "duplications retraction".
Retraction Watch has learned that a university in Australia has recommended that one of its researchers withdraw two papers. The reviews were "Cryptography and State-of-the-art Techniques" and "An Advanced Survey on Cloud Computing and State-of-the-art Research Issues".
June 5, 2020.
In "plagiarism".
