> this sounds like the science equivalent of how search engines lead to the creation of content farms. citation scores are to spam science as pagerank is to wikihow?
Or a science equivalent to what money and market competition does with all human ventures. You need more and faster than your competitors to progress, else you'll fall into obscurity. "First to publish" is isomorphic to "first to market". If you treat research as a videogame, citations fit perfectly as an in-game currency.
That is to say, it's an example of a general problem of optimizing short-term metrics, which are a decent proxy of the actual goal up to a point.
Science could definitely use a spam filter. Journals unfortunately do a poor way of being one; they're thoroughly gamed, the same way Google is via SEO.
At least in the market a junk product doesn't survive despite being first to market. The product needs to be good or at least inspire others to be regarded as a real contribution. This additional requirement is what's missing from the incentive system in science today.
Tons of junk survives and thrives in the market. Your great grandparent specifically brought up content farms as an example. Homeopathic remedies, counterfeit SD cards, the list goes on.
Nothing about markets magically solves the problem that if it's hard to evaluate quality, there will be junk masquerading as quality.
Or a science equivalent to what money and market competition does with all human ventures. You need more and faster than your competitors to progress, else you'll fall into obscurity. "First to publish" is isomorphic to "first to market". If you treat research as a videogame, citations fit perfectly as an in-game currency.
That is to say, it's an example of a general problem of optimizing short-term metrics, which are a decent proxy of the actual goal up to a point.
Science could definitely use a spam filter. Journals unfortunately do a poor way of being one; they're thoroughly gamed, the same way Google is via SEO.