The trifecta of salami-slicing, dodgy journals and peer-review fraud makes it clear that we shouldn’t be rating scientists on their total number of publications: quantity is far too easily gamed. One response to this has been instead to rate scientists according to the number of citations their papers receive. As we’ve just seen, this measure should give us a better indication of their actual contribution to science or to the community. In an extreme case, however, a scientist could have a single highly successful paper with thousands of citations, then follow it up with dozens of worthless
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