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Publish or perish is yet another example of Goodhart's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law).

Paper count is a terribly easy metric to game when used to evaluate academic output because publishing low quality papers doesn't count against the authors.

We can fix the problem in an unbiased manner by using ChatGPT to quantify article novelty, impact, and quality. /s

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I almost missed the /s in my anger while reading that last line. It's too close to being real...

You might want to get a paper bag to scream into: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06292

They say AI scientist, but it looked more like the NN Evolution by LLM Selection.

You also need citations though, and those don't come with low quality papers, nor will they help your reputation. To get citations people have to actually read your stuff.

Or organize a fraudulent citation ring.

Some scientific collaborations put thousands of people on every paper, publish around 100 papers a year, and cite at least 10 of their own papers in each one.

To some, that might be "a fraudulent citation ring". To others it's just business as usual.

Of course a lot of academia has caught on to the ruse, but the mitigations are pretty ugly: some funding agencies and universities just stopped counting papers from large experiments as valid scientific contributions.

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