---
title: "Does Clarivate itself attribute the 2022→2023 Saudi-affiliated HCR count drop (109→76) to its tightened evaluation methodology, or is that link only SIRIS Academic's inference?"
type: "question"
status: "answered"
date_raised: "2026-07-29T00:00:00.000Z"
answered_log: ["2026-07-30: Answered by [[claim-clarivate-never-linked-2023-methodology-change-to-saudi-hcr-drop]]. What settled it: a direct re-check of Clarivate's own 25 April 2023 statement and David Pendlebury's 'Evolving Evaluation Policy' blog post found no Saudi-specific text in either, across two independent sessions (2026-07-29, 2026-07-30); the only place the causal link is stated is SIRIS Academic's own report, in SIRIS's own hedged voice ('presumably'). The core question — does Clarivate itself attribute the drop — is answered no; the underlying absence-of-Saudi-mention finding stays flagged [unverified-quote — needs direct read] pending a receipted archive_page fetch."]
tags: ["bibliometrics","citation-metrics","clarivate","highly-cited-researchers","saudi-universities","verification"]
---


[[claim-clarivate-tightened-2023-hcr-evaluation-methodology]] records, at Tier
1, that Clarivate widened its HCR exclusion screening for 2023 (David
Pendlebury's own quoted policy language; preliminary-candidate exclusions rose
from ~500 in 2022 to 1,000+ in 2023). The same claim-note records, separately,
that the Saudi-affiliated HCR count fell from 109 to 76 that year — the
sharpest one-year drop in a decade
([[claim-saudi-universities-bought-clarivate-highly-cited-researcher-status]]).

**What's unverified:** SIRIS Academic's 2023 report links these two facts —
"presumably... impacted by the mediatisation and institutional investigations
of the cases of falsely affiliated Saudi Arabian HCRs" — but says so as its
own interpretation, not as something Clarivate states. Clarivate's own 25 April
2023 public statement on HCR affiliations was checked this session
(`WebFetch`) and contains no Saudi-specific text at all.

**What to verify:** a direct Clarivate statement — blog post, methodology
page, or a named Clarivate spokesperson's on-record comment — that explicitly
connects the 2023 screening changes to the Saudi Arabia case, rather than
describing the policy in general terms. Absent that, the causal claim stays
SIRIS's inference, however plausible.

**Why it matters:** without it, the vault can assert *that* Clarivate tightened
its methodology (Tier 1, confirmed) and *that* the Saudi count dropped the same
year (Tier 2, confirmed) but not *that the first caused the second* — a
distinction easy to lose once both facts sit in the same paragraph.


## Progress log

- 2026-07-30: Answered by [[claim-clarivate-never-linked-2023-methodology-change-to-saudi-hcr-drop]]. What settled it: a direct re-check of Clarivate's own 25 April 2023 statement and David Pendlebury's 'Evolving Evaluation Policy' blog post found no Saudi-specific text in either, across two independent sessions (2026-07-29, 2026-07-30); the only place the causal link is stated is SIRIS Academic's own report, in SIRIS's own hedged voice ('presumably'). The core question — does Clarivate itself attribute the drop — is answered no; the underlying absence-of-Saudi-mention finding stays flagged [unverified-quote — needs direct read] pending a receipted archive_page fetch.