It's paywalled, but Noahpinion had a good summary of the situation: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/how-much-of-modern-academia-is-waste https://www.noahpinion.bl

It's paywalled, but Noahpinion had a good summary of the situation: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/how-much-of-modern-academia-is-waste https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/how-much-of-modern-academia-is.... The key points are that breaking disciplines into tiny subfields essentially makes it easier to build citation rings (even if you don't intend to, the same reviewers see most papers and let through ones that cite themselves). With citation counts rather than quality working as karma in a competitive field (getting tenure) we shouldn't be surprised that some people supply a low quality but technically "peer-reviewed" journal.