Soft lobby of journals, metric keepers, and faculty are part of a closed circle.
Academics are victims of a crooked citation and metric system. And they mostly don’t even know.
The way academic incentive system works (for most universities):
☑ Do research, publish in high IF journals
☑ Get funding thanks to the high IF publications
☑ Rinse and repeat
Fundamental flaws of this system:
☑ Promotes journal prominence and control
☑ Enslaves the real value creators - researchers - in ‘publish or perish’
☑ Perpetuates failed metrics system & marginalizes niche and truly innovative research
If any system starts working against the interest of its constituents who set it up in order to benefit the community, it is a no-brainer it must change.
Academia - hold my beer..
But, seriously. IF, H-index, and similar metrics are harmful to science. How? Because they became an end for their own sake - high IF journal publication became a goal instead of science and discovery.
Citations? Niche papers, despite maybe being great, will never get many citations. And who goes into research to become ‘the most cited researcher’ anyway?
These metrics would be useful if they were:
1. NOT part of the official incentive system
2. Only used for popular and / or applied research topics
Anyhow - why did the system not change for most universities? The uncomfortable truth is, big publishers' soft lobby combined with support of the companies - like Clarivate, perpetuating the glory of publishing metrics, and including academics in creating this system (and thus their emotional attachment to it) are the root cause.
The closed circle is a clever snowball system. The snowball has been moving on its own for decades. Have you stepped out of it? I am curious to know. Fundamentals didn’t change though - journals are nothing without authors. They just didn’t realize it yet.
Which is why the snowball is rolling. When they realize it, it’ll melt.
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