‘Highly problematic’ policy has Saudi university pressuring faculty to cite its research
In an interoffice memo from 2022, Ahmed Yamani, president of the Riyadh-based institution, referred to “the rule of the requirement of citing 3-4 relevant publications in each paper” whose aim was “increasing the exposure of PSU research work and increasing the total number of PSU citations.”
To be reimbursed for publication fees, the memo stated, 40 percent of a paper’s authors must be faculty members at the university. Whether this policy is meant to prevent the school’s researchers from being gifted authorship simply to help pay publication fees is unclear.
Therefore, at Prince Sultan University in Saudi Arabia, faculty members must help raise their school’s academic standing not by doing impactful work, but by citing the institution’s research in their papers, according to a document.
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