The rector of the University of Salamanca (USal), Spain’s oldest and one of its most prestigious institutions, is under fire for allegedly engineering vast numbers of citations to his own work. Among the papers under suspicion are dozens of conference papers in Springer Nature publications. In a statement posted to his website in April, Corchado wrote that the papers on the university repository were “working papers” used in sessions with students, and that he had no reason to inflate his Google Scholar metrics.

Martín Martín and Delgado López-Cózar conducted further investigation. The pair examined 11,384 documents that Scopus reported as citing Corchado’s work, finding nearly 20% of the citations came from papers presented at just 30 conferences. In 31 of the 50 documents that cited Corchado the most, 70% of the references were to Corchado or the journal he edits, the Advances in Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence Journal (ADCAIJ). In six papers, more than 90% of the references were to Corchado or his journal. The vast majority of these 50 papers were in conference proceedings published by Springer Nature.