My view is that, like many other fields (including notably software engineering) before it, Academia has fallen victim to Goodhart/Campbell's law. Goodhart's l

My view is that, like many other fields (including notably software engineering) before it, Academia has fallen victim to Goodhart/Campbell's law. Goodhart's law is an adage named after economist Charles Goodhart: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." This follows from individuals trying to anticipate the effect of a policy and then taking actions which alter its outcome. Campbell's law (by Donald T. Campbell, a psychologist and social scientist), is similar, but has a more concrete focus on the predictably negative unintended consequences of using such indicators for decision / policy making: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor." For example, how schools evaluated by marks end up 'teaching to the test' or outright help children cheat. A simple combination of the two (to misuse Donald trump style) basically would say that using metrics: sounds good, doesn't work; worse still, it backfires. Goodhart's law focuses on the fact that metrics don't work; Campbell's on the fact that they tend to backfire. We have seen this time and time again in software engineering, when managers try to use crap like LOC metrics, or more recently "slack activity" to judge the quality of a software engineer. Academia is now experiencing its own version of Goodhart/Campbell's law. Between impact factors, h-indices, and now REF exercises, scientific progress is but an afterthought, and the system self-selects either those with a high ability of navigating this monstrous maze of inane metrics created by bureaucrats, or those with the ability to successfully commit academic dishonesty (p-hacking, optimal division of publication units etc) without getting caught, or both. And only extremely occasionally, people with truly novel ideas and output, which happen to somehow still manage to obtain funding despite not fitting into any of the tight little checkboxes that need to be ticked to get a grant on the latest grant-bandwagon.