Goodhart’s Law: Are Academic Metrics Being Gamed?
thegradient.pub
thegradient.pub
There are always questions of correlation vs causation of course, for example, in the article they talk about journals like science publishing more authors who have already published once. Is this actually because they are favoring these researchers, or the parallel effect of more collaborators per journal create more people who have ultimately published in the journal and increase the number of journals that have at least one previous publication in the journal just by chance?
Our study tries to answer various questions regarding how academic publications change over time . To answer your question, you can use our web interface (sciencedynamics.data4good.io) to explore various journal publications trends. You can observe clearly that in recent years the academic age of authors publishing in top journals increased significantly. You can also observe the percentage of returning first and last authors. Moreover, if you look at other journals like Scientific Reports, you can see different results regarding the percentage of returning authors.
What personally bothers me more is that we use pretty much the same measures to compare among researchers across different research fields.