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Goodhart's law on citation count... Too easy to game. It seems many people do this, and it works for them, because even if their peers just know who is doing it, they're still making bank, see Didier Raoult's paper mill.

See also: The Retraction Watch Leaderboard. Who has the most retractions?

https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch-leaderboard...

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Almost nobody is “making bank”.

Not in dollars, no, but a surprisingly large number of tenure decisions boil down to "does this researcher have a lot of citations to their work?" as a measure of the quality of their research.

Very true! And for the unfortunate ones who get tenture, well they miss out on making bank like the ones who leave academia for industry positions.

Fine, they are fighting like dogs over scraps. Is that a better idiom? Either way the system is broken.

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