Games academics play and their consequences: how authorship, h-index and journal impact factors are shaping the future of academia

Abstract

Research is a highly competitive profession where evaluation plays a central role; journals are ranked and individuals are evaluated based on their publication number, the number of times they are cited and their h-index. Yet such evaluations are often done in inappropriate ways that are damaging to individual careers, particularly for young scholars, and to the profession. Furthermore, as with all indices, people can play games to better their scores. This has resulted in the incentive structure of science increasingly mimicking economic principles, but rather than a monetary gain, the incentive is a higher score. To ensure a diversity of cultural perspectives and individual experiences, we gathered a team of academics in the fields of ecology and evolution from around the world and at different career stages. We first examine how authorship, h-index of individuals and journal impact factors are being used and abused. Second, we speculate on the consequences of the continued use of these metrics with the hope of sparking discussions that will help our fields move in a positive direction. We would like to see changes in the incentive systems, rewarding quality research and guaranteeing transparency. Senior faculty should establish the ethical standards, mentoring practices and institutional evaluation criteria to create the needed changes.

Keywords: academic ethics; academic evaluation; academic standards; h-index; impact factors; publishing practices.

Figure 1.

The number of authors of research articles in six journals through time. The area of each circle corresponds to the number of publications with that publication number for that year. To aid in the visual interpretation of the data, a generalized additive model was fitted to the data. For ease of interpretation, the number of authors is truncated at 100, meaning that publications with more than 100 co-authors are plotted here as just including 101 co-authors.

Figure 2.

The individualistic score based on Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory (this is the amount to which people in a society/culture are integrated into groups) of countries for which scores are available (https://www.hofstede-insights.com/product/compare-countries/). The higher this score, the greater the preference for a loosely knit social framework in which individuals are expected to take care of only themselves and their immediate families; the lower the score, the greater the preference for a tightly knit framework in a society where people expect their relatives or members of a particular group to look after them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty. Countries with a lower score are thought to be more likely to include unmerited authors on publications [26]. Countries in grey do not have available data. (Online version in colour.)