Fourteen universities may have manipulated institutional rankings, analysis finds

In 2019, researchers based at India’s Chandigarh University published 362 peer-reviewed research studies. In 2023, that number had shot up to 2281 – a 530% increase – which has seen Chandigarh jump from a ranking below 2000th to 578th in Elsevier’s SciVal tool ranking tool, which records the number of papers over 24,000 institutions publish annually.

Chandigarh is not the only university whose fortunes in these rankings have changed drastically. A total of 80 universities worldwide increased their research output by 100% or more, compared with a global average of around 20% between 2019 and 2023, according to a recent analysis.

At the same time, researchers at 14 of these institutions, including Chandigarh, showed significant declines in rates of first authorship – by up to eight times the global average. And the same 14 universities increased the rate by which their faculty co-authored papers with international colleagues by more than 10 times the global average in 2019–23. The group includes six public universities in Saudi Arabia, with the rest private institutions in India, Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon.

Chemistry World reached out to Chandigarh University for comment but received no response.

Study co-author Lokman Meho, an information scientist at the American Institute of Beirut, says the issue isn’t that research outputs are increasing at these institutions while first-author rates are decreasing. In fact, he says, that trend is very normal. ‘Globally, when research output increases significantly, it is natural to observe a decline in first-authorship rates,’ says Meho. ‘A larger number of publications typically involves more collaborative efforts, which inherently dilutes individual leadership roles.’ First authors carry out most of the work on a study, including research design, data collection and analysis.

Meho says the problem is how much output has increased and first-authorship rates declined at these institutions. ‘We were surprised at the sheer scale of the anomalies that we found,’ he says. The publication output of the 14 universities rose by between 100% and 1457% in the five-year period – an average increase of 234%. Research output from institutions in a control group – including the California Institute of Technology, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton University – increased by 1–6% during the same period.

Meho adds that the decline in first-authorship rates among the 14 institutions was much greater than that for their respective countries as a whole.

Ethical questions

The data raise questions over how researchers at these universities are sustaining such spikes in research output while their first-authorship rates plummet significantly. Meho and his Beirut colleague Elie Akl are concerned that the trend could point to unethical behaviour, such as gift or sold authorship.

Saveetha Institute of Medical and Technical Sciences (SIMTS) in Chennai, India, is another of the flagged institutions. According to reports, Saveetha Dental College, which is part of SIMTS, was publishing papers that its undergraduate students completed as part of their exams, leading to a significant spike in the number of papers produced by the institution. In 2023 and 2024, Saveetha Dental College was the highest-ranked dental institute in India. But it appeared that excessive self-citations and citation cartels were partly behind Saveetha’s success.

Chemistry World approached SIMTS for a comment.

Reducing incentives for researchers and institutions to game the system could combat the problem, says Meho. Higher rankings, for instance, can draw higher-quality researchers and students, and more funding, he points out. The pursuit of higher rankings, therefore, puts ‘intense pressure’ on institutions to publish more – ‘sometimes at the expense of ethical considerations’. 

Meho recommends that agencies that produce rankings should only consider a paper’s primary affiliations and not give equal credit to each co-author. 

Elizabeth Gadd, head of research culture and assessment at Loughborough University, agrees that it’s a problem if ranking agencies aren’t picking up on unethical practices. ‘I would like to see the sector taking much greater interest and control over the mechanisms by which they are assessed on the global stage, because I think there are much better ways that we could be doing this,’ she says.

In a separate analysis, Achal Agrawal, a data scientist who founded the India Research Watchdog, showed that countries such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, China, Egypt and India, whose research output has been rising rapidly, are retracting studies at much higher rates than other countries. Agarwal says that more sophisticated tools and metrics are needed to spot suspicious patterns. He adds that national regulators should audit institutions that are continually suspected of ‘cooking the books’. ‘Some accountability is needed,’ he says.