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Comment by almostgotcaught | Hacker News Reader

> Arguably some have figured how to game the system to advance their careers

lol arguably? i would bet my generous, non-academia, industry salary for the next 10 years, that there's not a single academic with a citation count over say ... 50k (ostensibly the most successful academic) that isn't gaming the system.

- signed someone who got their phd at "prestigous" uni under a guy with >100k citations

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Terence Tao has well over 50K citations. Maybe one can argue that he’s gaming the system because he alone can decide what problems are deemed to be interesting by the broader community, but he can’t help that.

In this case, it might matter that mathematics aren't strictly speaking, a science.

Citation counts are not very useful. They vary too much between fields and topics. I've seen people finish PhDs with ~20k citations, because they got involved in highly visible projects. And even if they stopped publishing new papers, they would have reached 50k citations in another 5-10 years purely on inertia.

There clearly are single examples here and you would lose this bet.

Username checks out.

I would take that bet. I postdoc'd with a very accomplished researcher (he won multiple Nobel Prize "precursor" awards). He certainly understood the social aspect of science - you need to be able to convince people your theories are correct and important - but I wouldn't say he "gamed the system" in any significant way.

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