By: Athar Osama Some Muslim countries' powerful financial incentives to make quick progress in research could backfire, cautions Athar Osama. Over a decade ago, several governments in the Islamic world woke up from decades of slumber to begin investing heavily in science and innovation. A funding boost helped set up new universities, enhance research grants, and send thousands of students to do PhDs in the developed world. The regulators and ministries that rolled out these ambitious efforts cautioned against judging their effectiveness and viability too soon, pointing to the limited scientificcapacity in these countries. It was popular to say, 'let's build a critical mass (quantity) first and worry about raising the standard (quality) later'. But there was clearly something amiss: some policies seemed either deficient or simply wrong-minded. And evidence of this is beginning to pile up. Evidence of misguided priorities The picture emerging is one of a mindless race to secure international publications and increase university rankings using 'shopping sprees' for highly cited academics, plagiarism and even outright academic fraud. A recent article published in Science highlights a practice, prevalent in at least a couple of Saudi Universities, of engaging prolific academics on so-called part-time contracts that pay handsomely in exchange for spending a couple of weeks on campus — and, critically, on condition that the university name is added to their ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) index profiles. The index is one of the factors included in world university rankings. This results in an artificially higher number of papers published by that university, and hence a higher ranking. To read further, click here. Islam Analysis: Money can't buy quality research
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