Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth

by Stuart Ritchie

So just like publication counts and h-indices, impact factors can be deliberately gamed. And as soon as scientists start to artificially inflate these numbers by self-citation, coercive citation and other suspect practices, they lose their meaning as measures of scientific quality. They begin to say less about which scientists and which journals are the best, and more about which have the most single-minded focus on boosting their metrics. It’s a clear example of Goodhart’s Law: ‘when a measure becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure’.55 As we’ve seen, these measures have very much become the explicit targets in our modern scientific culture, creating unforeseen consequences: a perverse incentive structure that favours meaningless metrics and superficial stats over replicability, rigour and genuine scientific progress.