To put it short:
Academic &quot;weight&quot; works much like google - the more citations paper has, the higher it is ranked. Of course a citation from local university journal (probably every university has at least one) is worth much, <i>much</i> less than a citation from Nature. It is calculated from Impact Factor, that is in turn calculated from number of citations. Sort of a closed loop.<p>This would not be too much of a problem if not for funding. You see, funding, that is necessary for anything non-trivial, is usually awarded according to researcher&#x27;s reputation - something again based on impact, citations, etc.