University in Saudi Arabia woos top scientists at Dutch universities to get better rankings

In order to reach the top of the prestigious Shanghai Rankings for universities, Saudi Arabia’s King Saud (KSU) University is wooing top scientists from all over the world, including the Netherlands, with lucrative offers. In the process, two Dutch professors have responded, according to de Volkskrant. As a result, Wageningen University & Research (WUR) launched an investigation.

It starts with an email that says King Saud University (KSU) in Riyadh is offering $70,000 a year to collaborate with the Saudi university, as well as 50,000 euros in research funding.

This also happened to soil biology professor Jan Willem van Groenigen, who first thought it was a phishing mail. Especially because the cooperation with the Saudi Arabian university would have taken place in an area in which he is not active at all, he said.

And for the stately sum, the professor would not have to move to Saudi Arabia either, but would only have to change his information on the first affiliation in an online database. In detail it means that no longer Wageningen University & Research (WUR) the institute for which van Groenigen mainly changes, is in the first place, but KSU. He also has to name KSU as the first university in three publications per year. In the end, however, the soil biology professor does not reply to the mail, he told de Volkskrant.

These requirements were also made to other Dutch scientists, including van Groeningen's work colleagues at WUR, who also left the emails unanswered.

The situation was different, however, a few years earlier for Vincenzo Fogliano, professor of food technologies at WUR. The latter stated from 2018 to 2020 that KSU was the main employer in the prestigious list of "highly cited researchers" of the British company Clarivate. In reality, however, Fogliano was primarily working and publishing at WUR during this period.

As a result, the more often a university professor appears on this list, the higher the university can climb in the prestigious Shanghai Rankings. And this is exactly the long-standing goal of the Saudi Arabian university. Namely, to rise in the ranking and "increase KSU's global visibility," as the university stated in the mail sent to van Groeningen and other professors. That's because KSU places a high priority on improving its international reputation, according to the university’s website. And collaborating with top scientists helps, the newspaper reported.

For WUR, however, the consequence of such cases is that they lose points in such rankings, as they are only listed as second employers, which in the worst case could lead to them slipping a few places in the rankings.