An independent 2014/2015 re-analysis of the original Thomson Reuters HCR list ranked King Abdulaziz University #2 worldwide by total researcher mentions — roughly six times the '27 primary-affiliation' count

Lutz Bornmann and Johann Bauer's paper "Which of the world's institutions employ the most highly cited researchers?" (JASIST, arXiv:1407.2037) independently re-derived HCR-per-institution counts directly from the original 2014 Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researchers list — the same list underlying the trajectory in claim-saudi-universities-bought-clarivate-highly-cited-researcher-status — but counted all listed affiliations per researcher rather than only the "primary" one. Under that method, King Abdulaziz University (KAU) ranks #2 worldwide with 160 researcher-mentions (80.28 under a fractionated-counting method that splits credit across a researcher's multiple affiliations), roughly six times the "27" figure that counts only primary Saudi affiliations in the same year (160 vs. 27 ≈ 5.9×).

The divergence is not a contradiction between sources — it is two different counting rules applied to the same underlying list. "27 in 2014" counts researchers who declared a Saudi institution as their primary affiliation; Bornmann & Bauer's 160 counts every researcher who listed KAU anywhere among their affiliations, primary or secondary, which is exactly the channel the affiliation-buying scheme in claim-saudi-universities-bought-clarivate-highly-cited-researcher-status exploited — cheap secondary affiliations that a primary-only count would undercount by design. It is a clean illustration of how much a bibliometric finding depends on which counting convention is chosen before the count ever starts.