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The whole "Cited 350 times" made me laugh. I used to think this type of number sounded impressive. Recently I just started to do a Masters and was told "1 citat

The whole "Cited 350 times" made me laugh. I used to think this type of number sounded impressive. Recently I just started to do a Masters and was told "1 citation for every hundred words", so dozens of papers need reading and it take for *ever* weeks to read just a small number. Then I recalled articles claiming most citations are never checked so, and you won't believe this, I skim read papers and if vaguely relevent inserted cursory comments from the paper and cited it. Did that go horribly wrong? Go on, guess. So 350? I so believe it.

ALittleLight 5y ago
That seems like it's own separate problem which is also bad.
- davidwritesbugs 5y ago
  It was just a lazy metric to measure effort and engagement, and that relieved the lecturer of the need to read the paper himself to see if you'd absorbed it and analysed its relevance correctly. I can't say I'm unsympathetic - the guy had 50 students to mark. I'm guessing this is standard in academia but if they'd said "read and include relevant papers" I'd have done a good job on half a dozen and the lecturer probably wouldn't have been overburdened either.
8K832d7tNmiQ 5y ago
Ah yes, the classic Goodhart's law [0] working as intended again. [0]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
- mhh__ 5y ago
  It's more of a "it'll do"-ism from bored supervisors IMO, could be imposed upon them but also is an easy way to avoid extra being different.
PeterisP 5y ago
Things like your master thesis or anything like that simply aren't included in the citation count at all, generally no one cares how much students or general public are citing your work so that practice has no influence on the metric being used. As the article states, it was cited 350 times in academic journals, i.e. cited in 350 reviewed publications with novel scientific work written by her peers.

ALittleLight 5y ago

That seems like it's own separate problem which is also bad.

davidwritesbugs 5y ago
It was just a lazy metric to measure effort and engagement, and that relieved the lecturer of the need to read the paper himself to see if you'd absorbed it and analysed its relevance correctly. I can't say I'm unsympathetic - the guy had 50 students to mark. I'm guessing this is standard in academia but if they'd said "read and include relevant papers" I'd have done a good job on half a dozen and the lecturer probably wouldn't have been overburdened either.

8K832d7tNmiQ 5y ago

Ah yes, the classic Goodhart's law [0] working as intended again. [0]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

mhh__ 5y ago
It's more of a "it'll do"-ism from bored supervisors IMO, could be imposed upon them but also is an easy way to avoid extra being different.

PeterisP 5y ago

Things like your master thesis or anything like that simply aren't included in the citation count at all, generally no one cares how much students or general public are citing your work so that practice has no influence on the metric being used. As the article states, it was cited 350 times in academic journals, i.e. cited in 350 reviewed publications with novel scientific work written by her peers.