The whole "publish or perish" paradigm has commodified scientific research. My theory is that the pre-WWI paradigm of academia being mainly for rich kids who could afford to devote their life to science did not scale, but it also had fewer issues with "making stuff up" since scientists were in it for the love of the game rather than making a living. I don't think we should go back to that model, but the MBA-inspired approach of treating "scientist" as a fungible role in a system and trying to apply metrics like citations to measure "impact" is doomed to fail in my opinion.