You Want to See My Data? I Thought We Were Friends
It's an excellent analysis of the fundamental problems in academia, but "people should just act against their incentives" isn't really a solution.<p>It really is the incentives themselves that are the problem: just looking at number of publications and citations (or even: citations of articles <i>in the journals that your articles happen to be published in as well</i>) when determine who to fund or hire.<p>The problem there is that we <i>have</i> those metrics, are relatively quick and easy to obtain, which are accepted because they are what's been used so far - even though plenty of research has pointed out their flaws yet [1]. And anything new that is proposed as a replacement of those metrics (whether other metrics, or other systems of evaluation) is dismissed for not being proven to live up to a standard that the currently used methods do not either, or for not being available quickly or easily enough. (Which is reasonable - e.g. it's not viable to read and properly evaluate all research of your applicants.)<p>(Disclosure: I do volunteer for a project, <a href="https://plaudit.pub" rel="nofollow">https://plaudit.pub</a>, that tries to offer an alternative nevertheless.)<p>[1] <a href="https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that-can-make-or-break-academic-careers-704e00ae070a" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that-ca...</a>