There is a moment, now familiar in universities across the world, when scholarship stops being treated as an intellectual project and starts becoming a box to check.

A young academic sits before an evaluation sheet and begins the small liturgy of contemporary career survival: Scopus publications, Web of Science publications, journal quartiles, impact factors, citation counts, h-index, indexed proceedings, international co-authorships, grant income, ranking contribution. The form does not ask what she is trying to understand, what society she hopes to serve, what problem has taken hold of her imagination, what body of work she is patiently building. It asks for countable traces. Scholarship, once understood as a labor of love — disciplined, public, argumentative, addressed to a community — becomes an inventory of scores.

This is not an argument against assessment. Universities must allocate resources, compare applicants, protect themselves from favoritism, and explain their choices to ministries, boards, donors, accreditors, and publics. Numbers can discipline patronage. A citation may trace conversation; an index may roughly map intellectual uptake. But the map has increasingly become the territory. What began as an aid to judgment has become, in many institutions, a substitute for judgment itself.

Something human is lost in this substitution: the old and necessary question of intellectual project. What is this person trying to do? Has she found a question large enough to organize her work, and generous enough to matter beyond her own advancement? Has she contributed to a scholarly community, a profession, a society that needs thought as much as it needs output? At some point, universities began asking this less often. In its place came a cleaner query: what is her h-index?

When the Measure Becomes the Master

Goodhart’s Law is usually rendered as follows: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. In research evaluation, this is no longer a warning. A large-scale study of more than 120 million papers found that academic publishing metrics (publication counts, citation counts, h-index scores, and journal impact factors) have become targets, compromising their validity as measures of research quality. Their distortions are familiar: shorter papers, longer author lists, swollen reference lists, rising self-citation, publication inflation, and weakening field comparability.

The h-index itself began modestly. In 2005, physicist Jorge E. Hirsch proposed it as “a useful index” to characterize the scientific output of an individual researcher: a scholar has index h when h of their papers have at least h citations each. It is clean, portable, and apparently fairer than judging people only by journal prestige. 

But like all elegant reductions, it gains power by losing context. It cannot reliably distinguish a careful scholar from a prolific networker, citation as admiration from citation as criticism, durable insight from fashionable uptake, or citation-dense fields from fields where books matter more. It also permits the fiction that publishing is a level playing field. A scholar in a regional university in the developing world has fewer chances to enter highly cited journals and earn the corresponding citation reward. A scholar writing in a locally important language, or on a problem urgent to her society but peripheral to the metropolitan center of a field, may produce serious work that barely registers in the global citation economy. The community may need the work; the database may barely notice it.

The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and the Leiden Manifesto exist precisely because this slippage has become dangerous. DORA warns against using journal-based metrics such as the Journal Impact Factor as proxies for the quality of individual articles or researchers; the Leiden Manifesto insists that quantitative indicators should support qualitative expert assessment, not replace it. Research missions differ; fields differ; publication practices differ; local relevance matters; indicators must be scrutinized for systemic effects. These declarations diagnose a quiet displacement: academic labor is being transformed from a vocation of contribution into the pursuit of productivity targets.

STEM Envy, Administrative Complacency

Much of the contemporary research-evaluation system carries a STEM bias into the rest of the university. That logic is not wrong in itself. In many fields, knowledge is properly produced through laboratories, experiments, datasets, clinical trials, technical reports, multi-authored articles, rapid citation cycles, methods sections, replication, and cumulative increments. A narrow paper may be an important paper. A five-author article may reflect genuine collaboration. There is no virtue in pretending that serious scholarship must always look like a solitary essay written slowly under a lamp.

But there is also no virtue in pretending that all serious scholarship should look like a STEM article. Law, philosophy, history, literary studies, political theory, anthropology, and much of the interpretive social sciences often work through different forms of time, authorship, and intellectual labor. Their major contributions may appear as monographs, long reflective articles, book chapters, archival reconstructions, doctrinal interventions, translations, public essays, or single-authored works that require years of immersion. Their force may lie in judgment, synthesis, interpretation, historical placement, or the slow reorganization of a field’s vocabulary. Such work may not generate immediate citation velocity, require a team, or come wrapped in literature review, methodology, results, and discussion.

This is a category error. A publication ecology that makes sense for certain sciences has been accepted as the universal grammar of all research. A book that reorganizes a field is placed beside a short indexed article as though both were interchangeable units of output. A single-authored theoretical essay may count for less than a stream of minor co-authored pieces. A scholar whose work influences courts, ministries, public debate, or intellectual movements may appear less “productive” than one whose articles circulate efficiently inside citation databases. This is not an objective metric but naturalized STEM bias. The absurdity is that universities know this and proceed in denial. 

What Counts Replaces What Matters

The deterioration of quality appears first as necessity. A scholar learns that three small articles may count more than one major argument. A department learns that publishing in indexed journals matters more than publishing where the right readers actually are. A university learns that rankings reward visibility, international co-authorship, citation velocity, and output volume. A doctoral student learns that the safest project is not the most necessary one, but the one most likely to generate publishable units. The question shifts, almost imperceptibly, from “What is worth knowing?” to “What can be made to count?”

This shift produces a recognizable style of academic life that is cautious, segmented, and performative. Long books give way to serial articles. Slow archives give way to rapid outputs. Risky interdisciplinary work is postponed until after tenure, then often forgotten. Local languages and publics are abandoned because they do not circulate in the databases that matter. A brilliant essay in Arabic, Greek, Spanish, or Bahasa may matter deeply to its intellectual community and barely exist in the global metrics economy. An average article in an indexed English-language journal may travel further, count more, and do less.

Once visibility becomes professional currency, questionable practices become thinkable, then ordinary, then almost rational. Some are crude, such as falsified data, fake peer review, purchased authorship, fabricated manuscripts. Others are softer, more ambient, such as honorary co-authorship, salami-slicing, strategic self-citation, citation favors, keyword inflation, journal shopping, reviewer appeasement, recycling of conference papers, excessive publication from the same dataset. These practices are not morally identical. Some are misconduct, others are merely shabby, and some live in that wide grey zone where everyone can tell but no one quite wants to say anything.

The literature on research integrity shows how wide that zone has become. The Dutch National Survey on Research Integrity, published in PLOS ONE in 2022, examined fabrication, falsification, and eleven questionable research practices across academic ranks and disciplines, treating publication pressure as one of the relevant explanatory factors. Its conclusion is sober enough: strengthening research integrity requires, among other things, curbing the publish-or-perish incentive system.

The Flex

In the quantified university, the new posture is to display. A scholar belongs to the “top 2%”. A department circulates the list. A university posts the congratulatory banner. LinkedIn fills with garlands of metricized triumph accompanied by a torrent of hearts, likes and page impressions. The ritual is strange because it gives a technical indicator the glow of moral achievement. “Top 2%” sounds like the result of an Olympiad of thought, as if the world’s scholars had gathered under neutral conditions and submitted their best ideas to the judgment of reason. 

There ought to be some truth in it, right? In reality, such lists are usually constructed through citation indicators, database coverage, field classifications, career-stage effects, co-authorship patterns, and other technical choices that may be useful for certain purposes but cannot bear the moral weight now placed upon them.

Academics are not monks of pure thought, and even monks, one suspects, appreciate being cited correctly. The absurdity lies in the transfiguration of an indicator into a virtue. A person whose work is heavily cited becomes, by institutional magic, a “top” scholar, although citation may reflect genuine influence, disciplinary fashion, large-team science, methodological utility, controversy, self-reinforcing networks, or simply the accumulated advantage of having entered the right database at the right time.

There is a small comedy here. The same university that tells students not to confuse social media with truth may congratulate itself because one of its academics has become viral. The same faculty member who would never accept a student’s argument without reading the underlying text may circulate a metric as proof of excellence without asking what, exactly, has been measured.

The Counterfeit Economy of Recognition

Predatory journals are the most visible storefront. They mimic the outward signs of legitimacy: editorial boards, impact factors, indexing claims, peer-review language, international titles, rapid publication schedules. Their business model feeds on anxiety. They sell recognition to scholars who need lines on a CV, institutional compliance to universities that need publication counts, and symbolic internationalism to systems trying to climb global rankings. A 2018 review in Biochemia Medica describes how false impact factors and fake metrics are used to attract submissions to predatory journals.

This is a market in counterfeit recognition. Predatory publishers know the signs that universities have taught scholars to value: indexed, international, peer reviewed, high impact, with fast decisions. They do not need to defeat the metric system. They need only imitate its surface. PredatoryJournals.org lists warning signs that include misleading claims about publishing operations, fake or non-existent impact factors, fake academics on editorial boards, unauthorized listing of scholars, and mimicry of established journals.

Fake metrics complete the theater. A dubious journal can invent an “impact factor”, exaggerate downloads, advertise obscure indexing services, or use citation networks to simulate relevance. The weaker the journal’s scholarly standing, the more aggressively it often performs metricized legitimacy.

Citation manipulation adds another layer. COPE, the Committee on Publication Ethics, treats citation manipulation as a serious publication ethics issue, including coercive citation practices in which authors are pressured to cite particular works as a condition of acceptance. A large-scale 2016 study found evidence of impact-factor-biased journal self-citation and connected these patterns to coercive citation practices and strategic responses by authors.

The citation, once a scholarly courtesy and a way of locating one’s argument within a field, becomes an instrument of inflation. It still looks like scholarship; it still appears in the footnotes; but its meaning has shifted. It is no longer only a sign of intellectual debt but a move in a game.

More brazen still are paper mills: organizations that produce manuscripts, manipulate submission processes, and sell authorship slots. A 2024 article in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology describes paper mills as organizations that make money by writing fake manuscripts and offering authorship slots for sale, noting that many thousands of such manuscripts have entered peer-reviewed journals.

The Small Permissions

A colleague’s name appears on a paper for which the contribution was ceremonial. A senior academic joins a project late and becomes an author because hierarchy has its own gravitational field. A research group treats authorship as a currency of internal exchange. A paper that could have been a careful two-page insight becomes twenty pages of literature review, methodological boilerplate, redundant exposition, and decorative citation. A dataset becomes five papers where one would have been enough. A conference proceeding is recycled into a journal article with minor cosmetic changes. The same argument returns in new clothes, then again, then again, each time with a different title and the same exhausted soul.

No one challenges it too loudly. The paper counts. The university’s ranking improves. The department’s annual report looks healthier. The Research Ethics Committee remains silent because the case is not crude enough; the promotion committee remains silent because the record is numerically useful; the dean remains silent because the institution benefits. What might once have been called intellectual vanity becomes, under metric pressure, a contribution to strategic performance. This is how ethical discernment thins out: not through one grand collapse, but through a thousand small permissions.

The university becomes skilled at looking away from the practices that feed its numbers. It may condemn plagiarism, fabrication, and predatory publishing in official policy while rewarding the surrounding behaviors that make them more likely: overproduction, hurried publication, artificial collaboration, citation maximization, journal-brand fetishism, and the bureaucratic treatment of research as evidence of institutional movement. The system is severe toward the student who copies a paragraph and indulgent toward the academic culture that converts thin work into measurable output. It polices the amateur fraud and tolerates the professionalized approximation.

But here is the bitter truth: once the metric becomes the proof of value, anything that increases the metric begins to look like value. The institution may still speak the language of ethics, but its incentives speak more clearly. They say: produce, appear, circulate, optimize. They say: originality is welcome, but volume is safer. They say: two pages of difficult thought are admirable, but twenty indexed pages will improve rankings more.

Predation is not evenly distributed, and neither is vulnerability. Scholars in underfunded universities, peripheral academic systems, unstable labor markets, or highly bureaucratized promotion regimes often face the harshest incentives. It is too easy for elite institutions to condemn low-quality publishing while ignoring the global hierarchies that make publication counts so consequential elsewhere. A professor in a secure, well-funded university may write slowly, publish selectively, and be praised for depth. A scholar in a metrics-driven system may be told that without indexed publications there is no promotion, contract renewal, travel funding, graduate supervision, or institutional respect. The scandal, then, is not only individual misconduct. It is institutional culture. Universities teach scholars what not to contest.

The Chariot of Rankings

Anyone who has sat in a university committee meeting knows the choreography. Someone raises a concern: Scopus counts are being mistaken for research quality; quartiles are disciplining intellectual life; rankings are becoming not indicators of institutional health but scripts for institutional behavior. The room tightens. A senior administrator nods. No one quite disagrees. Then comes the answer: this is the world we live in; students, ministries, partners, boards, and competitors all look at rankings. We cannot afford not to play.

This is the genius of metric culture: it makes refusal look naïve. The burden of proof falls not on the metric, but on the person who refuses to be governed by it. Rational university boards tie themselves to a chariot whose direction is partly set by commercial actors outside the university because rankings offer a usable fiction. They condense complexity into a single story. They allow a board to ask whether the university is “going up” or “going down”. They make academic life—messy, plural, language-bound, field-specific, slow—available to non-specialists in seconds.

The fiction is commercially produced. Scopus is owned by Elsevier, a major commercial publisher and analytics provider. QS is hardly the academic senate of the world but Quacquarelli Symonds, a higher-education analytics, rankings, recruitment, events, consultancy, and services company, offers universities ways to improve the rankings in a system that they own. Times Higher Education (THE) is also embedded in a commercial ecosystem. Inflexion Private Equity announced in 2019 that it had acquired THE, describing it as a provider of university data, rankings, content, and services. Clarivate, which owns Web of Science and related analytics products, markets InCites as a benchmarking tool for strategy, peer comparison, funding outcomes, and collaboration.

None of this means these tools are fraudulent or redundant. The point is simpler: the university is buying instruments through which it learns to see itself. Rankings tell universities what counts; universities reorganize themselves to improve what counts; improved performance then confirms the authority of the ranking. The metric becomes both mirror and motor.

This is how the institution of thought learns to behave like an anxious brand. It spends money, labor, and administrative imagination trying to improve its performance before instruments that reward visibility, velocity, and reputational echo.

Read the Work (Please!)

Numbers should return to their proper place. The problem is not that administrators look at metrics but that too many have forgotten to look past them. The time has come to say this plainly. “This is the world we live in” is not pragmatism but a confession of surrender. Universities buy the databases, subscribe to the analytics, reward the outputs, redesign promotion criteria around the signals, celebrate the top-two-percent lists, and look away from gift authorship when the gift improves the numbers. Then they speak solemnly of excellence. The emperor is naked, holding a dashboard.

A serious university would begin again with the work. It would ask: what is this scholar trying to do? What problem has she clarified? What public has she served? What field has she unsettled, deepened, or made more honest? Who has read the work, argued with it, taught it, used it, translated it, resisted it? Citation counts may assist that conversation, but they cannot replace it. The evaluative center must be judgment, not accumulation.

If universities continue to reward appearance over substance, speed over formation, and visibility over thought, they run the risk of terminally hollowing out the reason anyone should trust them. The university’s claim to public value has never rested on its ability to mimic the market. It rests on its capacity to preserve spaces where thought can be slow, difficult, critical, and free. If the university forgets this, it will have outsourced its soul voluntarily, one metric at a time.