During my PhD in France in 2015, I was introduced to how the scientific process works and how it could be subverted. However, I was indifferent to misconduct. I knew the good journals in my field and did not want to waste my time reading low-quality papers or flagging them. This all changed when I joined a university that was doing very well in national and international rankings.

Targets that reward misconduct

When I joined a university that ranked well nationally and internationally, I expected to find high-quality research there. However, I was shocked to see unrealistic research targets imposed on academics, and how blatantly researchers committed misconduct to pump up the numbers. The unrealistic targets included producing five single-author conference articles a year, just to be considered an average performer. This was expected even with 16 hours of teaching per week and no laboratory resources, PhD students or funding. Not only were my colleagues achieving these targets, but they were far exceeding them, with some publishing over 50 research papers a year. The university lionized those very researchers and gave them “Best Researcher” awards. The few times I tried to call out the university’s incentive system, my colleagues sneered at my attempts. Things changed when I interacted with undergraduate students, who told me how professors were replacing assignments with research papers and teaching them how to plagiarize without getting caught. Some professors used to give students random instructions during lab sessions and instead work on their own research papers. I realized that the problem had gone far beyond the proverbial “few bad apples” and was massively affecting not just research but education as well.

How rankings shape choices

During this time, I also realized the massive influence university rankings have on students' and parents' decisions when choosing a college. This is because research outputs like the number of research papers and citation counts are easy to measure. However, these measures can also be easily gamed, which is what many universities are doing right now. For example, paper mills specialize in writing research papers for a fee. Some even help increase citation counts for a fee. All this helps many universities climb up the rankings, without meaningfully contributing to research.

Why I started India Research Watch

I conducted a small survey of the new batch of students who had joined the university, and almost 50% said they joined it because of the university’s performance in the