A decade ago I was critically opposed to the gamification of academic peer-review. It is sad to see my suspicions vindicated through Goodhart's law.

https://www.science.org/content/article/suspicious-phrases-peer-reviews-point-referees-gaming-system

Point in case: "They could then take credit for the work on their CVs to gain a boost in professional evaluations. Some may have additional self-interest: Several reviewers asked the author to include citations to their own papers, and some authors complied."

#academia #ethics #peerreview #publishing #gamification

‘We need to slow down scientific publishing’

'We focus on metrics to evaluate a scientist’s career: how many articles they have published, how many times they were cited, what was the impact factor of all these articles. '

https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2024-04-26/elisabeth-bik-expert-in-scientific-integrity-we-need-to-slow-down-scientific-publishing.html

#publishing #science #stem #academicchatter

Elisabeth Bik, expert in scientific integrity: ‘We need to slow down scientific publishing’

The Dutch microbiologist has been voluntarily searching for duplicate, erroneous or retouched academic images for more than 10 years and warning universities and scientific journals about it

^{Beatriz Olaizola (Ediciones EL PAÍS S.L.)}

Counting citations hasn't been a reliable measure of scientific impact for a while, especially on platforms like Google Scholar that compile info from random documents. Hyper-authorship, predatory journals, etc have all contributed to the problem.

This preprint just drives home how important it is to measure scientific impact more carefully and without reliance on automated metrics

Google Scholar is manipulatable

https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.04607

#science #academia #publishing #citations

Google Scholar is manipulatable

Citations are widely considered in scientists' evaluation. As such, scientists may be incentivized to inflate their citation counts.

^arXiv.org

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Then, when the author tries to do something about it to stop this obvious #abuse, they are told no.

Talented people of Mastadon—

Grants available for unpublished diverse writers and illustrators https://diversebooks.org/programs/walter-grant/

#kidlit #publishing #illustration #writing

Walter Grant

The Walter Dean Myers Grant provides financial support to diverse authors and illustrators who are currently unpublished.

^{We Need Diverse Books}

• About time! All MDPI journals are "predatory" (57%, 26 votes)
• Mmm, only some MDPI journals are "predatory" (20%, 9 votes)
• MDPI journals are iffy, but not fully "predatory" (20%, 9 votes)
• MDPI journals are fine! (2%, 1 vote)