
Goodhart’s Law: Are Academic Metrics Being Gamed? - hughzhang
https://thegradient.pub/over-optimization-of-academic-publishing-metrics/
======
vikramkr
Does betterridge's law always hold? No, and to the question in this title, of
course they are.

There are always questions of correlation vs causation of course, for example,
in the article they talk about journals like science publishing more authors
who have already published once. Is this actually because they are favoring
these researchers, or the parallel effect of more collaborators per journal
create more people who have ultimately published in the journal and increase
the number of journals that have at least one previous publication in the
journal just by chance?

~~~
data4goodlab
I am the author of the paper, so feel free to ask me anything.

Our study tries to answer various questions regarding how academic
publications change over time . To answer your question, you can use our web
interface (sciencedynamics.data4good.io) to explore various journal
publications trends. You can observe clearly that in recent years the academic
age of authors publishing in top journals increased significantly. You can
also observe the percentage of returning first and last authors. Moreover, if
you look at other journals like Scientific Reports, you can see different
results regarding the percentage of returning authors.

What personally bothers me more is that we use pretty much the same measures
to compare among researchers across different research fields.

