Interesting Stuff Citation Cartels - This article from science.org is about some rather unknown universities using citation count to boost their relative profile in the field of mathematics. The main metric being manipulated is highly cited papers, which is a count of how many other papers cite that paper as a stand-in for the paper’s quality. Some universities in China and Saudi Arabia figured this out and managed to get themselves to be ranked fairly high in the field of math, which typically does not have that many highly cited papers in any given year. This is an excellent example of Goodhart’s Law which states that a measure becomes useless once it becomes the target.
Bitcoin Tech Talk #382
Bitcoin Tech Talk #382
Bitcoin Tech Talk #382
Interesting Stuff Citation Cartels - This article from science.org is about some rather unknown universities using citation count to boost their relative profile in the field of mathematics. The main metric being manipulated is highly cited papers, which is a count of how many other papers cite that paper as a stand-in for the paper’s quality. Some universities in China and Saudi Arabia figured this out and managed to get themselves to be ranked fairly high in the field of math, which typically does not have that many highly cited papers in any given year. This is an excellent example of Goodhart’s Law which states that a measure becomes useless once it becomes the target.