The landscape of quantitative bibliometric indicators is vast, and it comes with both benefits and pitfalls. Metrics have become central to research assessments, influencing the careers of countless scientists. However, their importance has also given rise to gaming practices, where individuals or groups manipulate these metrics to boost their academic standing. This review dives into various gaming practices, shedding light on authorship-based, citation-based, editorial-based, and journal-based gaming, along with instances of outright fabrication.
Authorship-based Gaming:
- Gift Authorship: This involves listing authors who haven't made a substantial contribution to the work. Surveys suggest a high prevalence of gift authorship.
- Ghost Authorship: Here, the actual authors are invisible, with industry employees often doing the work and academics taking credit.
- Contributorship: While efforts like the CREDIT system aim for more granular information on contributions, gaming can still occur by manipulating credit allocation.
Quantitative Approaches to Detect Authorship Gaming:
- Hyper-prolific Scientists: Large-scale bibliometric databases help identify hyper-prolific scientists, especially those with significant productivity changes after assuming powerful positions.
- Co-author Network Analysis: Quantitative methods analyze co-author networks, generating metrics that account for co-authorship patterns, author positions, and relative contributions.
Citation-based Gaming:
- Massive Self-citations: Authors artificially inflate their citation count by excessively citing their own work.
- Citation Farms: Groups of researchers cite each other's work excessively to boost citation numbers.
Quantitative Approaches to Detect Citation Gaming:
- Co-authorship-adjusted Metrics: Metrics like Schreiber's hm index adjust for co-authorship, providing a more accurate reflection of a researcher's impact.
Editorial-based Gaming:
- Journalistic Nepotism: Editors favor authors with personal connections, potentially leading to biased publication practices.
Journal-based Gaming:
- Impact Factor Gaming: Some journals manipulate factors influencing impact to boost their standing.
Quantitative Approaches to Detect Journal-based Gaming:
- Altmetrics: Beyond traditional metrics, alternative metrics can provide a more comprehensive view of a journal's influence.
Conclusion: While gaming practices pose challenges to research assessments, quantitative approaches offer a way to navigate and counteract these issues. From analyzing authorship patterns to developing adjusted metrics, the quantitative landscape can contribute to more transparent, fair, and rigorous assessments of scientific work. As the pursuit of excellence in research continues, these approaches play a crucial role in upholding the integrity of quantitative evaluations.
