Goodhart’s Law: Are Academic Metrics Being Gamed?


Essay by Michael Fire: “…We attained the following five key insights from our study:

First, these results support Goodhart’s Law as it relates to academic publishing; that is, traditional measures (e.g., number of papers, number of citations, h-index, and impact factor) have become targets, and are no longer true measures importance/impact. By making papers shorter and collaborating with more authors, researchers are able to produce more papers in the same amount of time. Moreover, the majority of changes in papers’ structure are correlated with papers that receive higher numbers of citations. Authors can use longer titles and abstracts, or use question or exclamation marks in titles, to make their papers more appealing for readers and increase citations, i.e. academic clickbait. These results support our hypothesis that academic papers have evolved in order to score a bullseye on target metrics.

Second, it is clear that citation number has become a target for some researchers. We observe a general increasing trend for researchers to cite their previous work in their new studies, with some authors self citing dozens, or even hundreds, of times. Moreover, a huge quantity of papers – over 72% of all papers and 25% of all papers with at least 5 references – have no citations at all after 5 years. Clearly, a signficant amount of resources is spent on papers with limited impact, which may indicate that researchers are publishing more papers of poorer quality to boost their total number of publications. Additionally, we noted that different decades have very different paper citation distributions. Consequently, comparing citation records of researchers who published papers in different time periods can be challenging.

Number of self-citations over time

Third, we observed an exponential growth in the number of new researchers who publish papers, likely due to career pressures. …(More)”.