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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

"In 2017, a study showed that scientists in Italy began citing themselves more heavily after a controversial 2010 policy was introduced that required academics to meet productivity thresholds to be eligible for promotion"

Cobra Effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

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More like Goodhart‘s law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

"What gets measured gets treasured."

and the corollary, "the uncountable is of no account"

I'd never seen that, and it reminds me of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle somehow.

Heisenberg's principle says that when you measure one thing, you lose track of others. I guess it's kind of complementary to this (except that it applies to very different things, obviously).

I don't see that it's the Cobra effect. Did it actively make them less productive?

Publication standards are different between disciplines. Traditionally, a materials chemist publishes many times more papers than a structural biologist. With a metric like that, you run whole sub-disciplines out of town.

Reminds me of a theater professor I know who was having trouble meeting the new rigorous rules for tenure.

Publish? What and where exactly?

If it means that some academics are choosing to cite their own papers rather than keeping up to date on the literature of their field, there's likely to be some potential insights missed.

There's no reason to assume that adding a self cite affects how much they read others.

Not self-citing in incremental work would be like a software team erasing commit history at the beginning of each sprint, claiming that it's all new code. The post-metric amount of self citing might be less misleading than what they did before.

People who are rewarded are the people most cited, even if they are citing themselves.

Think that’s producing the best scientific results?

> Think that’s producing the best scientific results?

That's a strawman. The answer you were looking for is, "I don't know". I don't know either.

I’d say it makes Publish or perish even worse:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_or_perish

Is being cited a productivity metric?

In Italy it is one of the three metrics used. The others are the number of published papers and the h-index.

This is the table of thresholds for associate professorship ("II Fascia") and full professorship ("I Fascia"): http://abilitazione.miur.it/public/documenti/2018/Tabelle_Va... "Numero articoli" is "number of papers", "Numero citazioni" is "number of citations", and "Indice H" is "h-index". The thresholds are different for each research area (e.g., "INFORMATICA" is "computer science").

The topic is actually a little bit more complex, since looking at the metrics is only one step of the process.

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