Metric fixation

updated: 2023-01-04
#science-of-science

Research evaluation has been increasingly operationalized by bibliometric indicators such as citations and publication counts. At the same time, scientists face an increasing-pressure to publish for survival. Some scientists are fixated excessively on these indicators and choreograph their citation and publication behavior.

Instances

• Citation cartels
• Citation stacking by Brasilian journals
• Nelson Tansu became a highly cited researcher just by self-citation page
• Ji-Huan He is also famous for strong fixation on citations. Nefarious Numbers
• Author-level citation cartels. Tansu Citation cartel
• EI Naschie was editor-in-chief of the journal, "Chaos, Solutions, and Fractals", where he published more than 300 papers in his journal. After many requests, Elsavior announced that he was resigned from the chief-in-editor. Ji-Huan He is a supporter of his source from Science Translational Medichine.
• Ravi Agarwal https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/201902/rnoti-p227.pdf
• Torture phrases. Using GPT3 and machine translation: source

Effort to identify cartel-like behaviors

• Author-level citation stacking source
• CIDRE
• Pressure to publish is ‘fuelling illegal practices in palaeontology’