Science Memes

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328

Is there a way out? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Score could be kept with citations. You'd be required to list the work you built on, as we do today, and the authors would receive credit. No citation would be worth more than another. If you published something useful for a particular field or made a major discovery that opened a new field, then your citation count would reflect it.

Wouldn't you be able to game that by having 2 entities spamming citations for each other?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Your peers would know and they'd think you're pathetic. There'd be nothing to gain.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

On GitHub there is a tracker for how many commits you make in a year, but it's super easy to fake. But it's also pretty obvious when you fake it haha

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (2 children)

If grants are tied to the "score" there is an incentive to abuse the system.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

and similarly, any metric tied to a reward is no longer a metric worth measuring for the purposes of maintaining system health

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

True, but I feel like abuse would be fairly obvious and grant panels would know if someone is gaming the system. The panels, at least in my former field, are composed mostly of people who know who's doing what in their field. If they saw a high citation count they would know if that was legitimate. If anything, faking citations would be shameful and embarrassing for most people.