> I'm interested in the apparent contradiction between the "tens of thousands of citations" credential for your evidently competent labmate who caught the fraud, and the "only high impact numbers get citations, only citations get you a chance to progress in the academia pyramid" indictment of the evidently mediocre fraudster.
Not every paper out there is fake and Yella Aswani [1], was an excellent PhD in Switzerland before becoming a full time professor in India.
That being said, some of her colleagues might have felt desperate to publish something meaningful before ending their PhD and cooked the numbers by that 8/10% that makes it impressive. Either that or they took an outlier result that overperformed for some reason (poor instrument calibration e.g.) and never investigated and just published.
Not every paper out there is fake and Yella Aswani [1], was an excellent PhD in Switzerland before becoming a full time professor in India.
[1] https://scholar.google.pl/citations?user=PHS1UAcAAAAJ&hl=en&...
That being said, some of her colleagues might have felt desperate to publish something meaningful before ending their PhD and cooked the numbers by that 8/10% that makes it impressive. Either that or they took an outlier result that overperformed for some reason (poor instrument calibration e.g.) and never investigated and just published.
In any case, the numbers didn't match up.