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"In 2017, a study showed that scientists in Italy began citing themselves more heavily after a controversial 2010 policy was introduced that required academics
by melling 7y ago
"In 2017, a study showed that scientists in Italy began citing themselves more heavily after a controversial 2010 policy was introduced that required academics to meet productivity thresholds to be eligible for promotion"
Cobra Effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
- MaxBarraclough 7y agoI don't see that it's the Cobra effect. Did it actively make them less productive?
- HarryHirsch 7y agoPublication standards are different between disciplines. Traditionally, a materials chemist publishes many times more papers than a structural biologist. With a metric like that, you run whole sub-disciplines out of town.
- Gibbon1 7y agoReminds me of a theater professor I know who was having trouble meeting the new rigorous rules for tenure. Publish? What and where exactly?
- duskwuff 7y agoIf it means that some academics are choosing to cite their own papers rather than keeping up to date on the literature of their field, there's likely to be some potential insights missed.
- lonelappde 7y agoThere's no reason to assume that adding a self cite affects how much they read others.
- usrusr 7y agoNot self-citing in incremental work would be like a software team erasing commit history at the beginning of each sprint, claiming that it's all new code. The post-metric amount of self citing might be less misleading than what they did before.
- melling 7y agoPeople who are rewarded are the people most cited, even if they are citing themselves. Think that’s producing the best scientific results?
- reallydude 7y ago> Think that’s producing the best scientific results? That's a strawman. The answer you were looking for is, "I don't know". I don't know either.
- melling 7y agoI’d say it makes Publish or perish even worse: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_or_perish https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_or_perish
- tomtomistaken 7y agoMore like Goodhart‘s law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
- austinjp 7y ago"What gets measured gets treasured."
- SI_Rob 7y agoand the corollary, "the uncountable is of no account"
- jjtheblunt 7y agoI'd never seen that, and it reminds me of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle somehow.
- marcosdumay 7y agoHeisenberg's principle says that when you measure one thing, you lose track of others. I guess it's kind of complementary to this (except that it applies to very different things, obviously).
- lonelappde 7y agoIs being cited a productivity metric?
- __lm__ 7y agoIn Italy it is one of the three metrics used. The others are the number of published papers and the h-index. This is the table of thresholds for associate professorship ("II Fascia") and full professorship ("I Fascia"): http://abilitazione.miur.it/public/documenti/2018/Tabelle_Valori_Soglia_ALLEGATI_DM_589_2018.pdf http://abilitazione.miur.it/public/documenti/2018/Tabelle_Va... "Numero articoli" is "number of papers", "Numero citazioni" is "number of citations", and "Indice H" is "h-index". The thresholds are different for each research area (e.g., "INFORMATICA" is "computer science"). The topic is actually a little bit more complex, since looking at the metrics is only one step of the process.