• Intern Emerg Med · Jan 2024

    Review

    Quantitative research assessment: using metrics against gamed metrics.

    • IoannidisJohn P AJPA0000-0003-3118-6859Departments of Medicine, of Epidemiology and Population Health, of Biomedical Data Science, and of Statistics, and Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS), Stanford University, SPRC, MSOB X306, 1265 Wel and Zacharias Maniadis.
    • Departments of Medicine, of Epidemiology and Population Health, of Biomedical Data Science, and of Statistics, and Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS), Stanford University, SPRC, MSOB X306, 1265 Welch Rd, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA. jioannid@stanford.edu.
    • Intern Emerg Med. 2024 Jan 1; 19 (1): 394739-47.

    AbstractQuantitative bibliometric indicators are widely used and widely misused for research assessments. Some metrics have acquired major importance in shaping and rewarding the careers of millions of scientists. Given their perceived prestige, they may be widely gamed in the current "publish or perish" or "get cited or perish" environment. This review examines several gaming practices, including authorship-based, citation-based, editorial-based, and journal-based gaming as well as gaming with outright fabrication. Different patterns are discussed, including massive authorship of papers without meriting credit (gift authorship), team work with over-attribution of authorship to too many people (salami slicing of credit), massive self-citations, citation farms, H-index gaming, journalistic (editorial) nepotism, journal impact factor gaming, paper mills and spurious content papers, and spurious massive publications for studies with demanding designs. For all of those gaming practices, quantitative metrics and analyses may be able to help in their detection and in placing them into perspective. A portfolio of quantitative metrics may also include indicators of best research practices (e.g., data sharing, code sharing, protocol registration, and replications) and poor research practices (e.g., signs of image manipulation). Rigorous, reproducible, transparent quantitative metrics that also inform about gaming may strengthen the legacy and practices of quantitative appraisals of scientific work.© 2023. The Author(s).

      Pubmed     Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…