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14 May 2014: The growing power of citations in university hiring and funding policies
In February 2014, Pacific Standard ran an article that made waves in both the academic sector and the social media blogosphere. To date, it remains the magazine’s second most popular online article. The piece, ‘Why Americans are the Weirdest People in the World’, summarised the research of University of British Columbia academics Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan (2010), whose article, ‘The Weirdest People in the World?’ has been cited 1058 times since its publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Its intriguing title, coupled with the bold claims made within the article about inherent Western bias in sociological, psychological, and economic studies, led to its proliferation across the Web. In essence, the magazine article mirrored the meteoric rise made by the research article it was summarising – but it gained traction by using social media in an accessible, public domain. The researchers were called ‘visionary’, ‘game-changing’, and ‘daring’, while their citation count on Google Scholar skyrocketed.
The rapid dissemination of this particular study is fascinating in its own right, but it is also indicative of the growing relevance of an academic practice: universities placing emphasis on a candidate’s citations during the formulation of their hiring, tenure-track, and funding policies. However, this traditional approach to measuring scholarship and influence is now affected directly by forces outside of academia; there are a myriad of ways these citation figures can be influenced by new technologies like social media. The ramifications of relying heavily on social media have not yet been fully considered by employers. Placing such clout behind citation-counting may lead to inherentbiases that could damage the institutions and their legacies in the long term.
Admittedly, universities have always placed a great deal of pressure on their academics to publish quality research quickly and in high quantities. The common phrase ‘publish or perish’, popularised in the 1930s, highlights this legacy. However, in recent years, the effects of this practice have illustrated the problematic nature of emphasising citation count above other metrics when ranking quality academic departments or hiring new professorial staff.
A university in Saudi Arabia, for example, has begun paying more than sixty leading experts from institutions around the world to include the university as an affiliate in the experts’ research publications – a practice that amounts to buying academic prestige through the resulting rise in research ranking slots. The more citations an institution receives, the more likely it is to rank highly in international research tables; therefore, in this highly competitive system of citation indexing, institutions are likely to seek out academics with the highest amount of citations during their hiring processes. Similarly, departments with the highest citations are likely to receive more funding after being deemed ‘prestigious’ or ‘world-leading’.
This trend is problematic for numerous reasons. As Albert László Barabási, Northeastern University’s world-leading network scientist and distinguished University Professor of Physics points out, these measures are used to measure success in the academic community, but ‘they don’t actually do a very good job of predicting the future impact of a paper or success of a career’. Nevertheless, if hiring and funding practices such as citation indexing are to continue in earnest, several inherent biases must be addressed.
First, there is the fact that many disciplines are immediately placed at a disadvantage when they are compared to others vis-à-vis citation counts. History departments – one example of many – would be less likely to acquire more citation counts than, say, international relations. As a discipline that often publishes lengthy, composite works that aren’t always counted separately (due to sometimes being erroneously attributed solely to their editor) or comprised of articles that have already been published elsewhere, history is unlikely to rival international relations. There, articles on current events and their relation to each other are frequent and easily disseminated. A comparison between numerous other disciplines would yield the same result, each further emphasising that the standard of citation indexing inherently places academic departments on unequal footing.
Furthermore, the argument can be made that citation count alone is not indicative of good scholarship – particularly in the cases of ‘viral’ studies and proliferated ‘pop-science’ articles. The speed in which a still-developing study can circulate through social media and be cross-referenced online before even being properly peer-reviewed means that many academics might turn to using the medium in an effort to gain more citations than their more-established peers in a shorter period of time. If a university isn’t properly examining the parameters in which a potential new-hire’s citations were employed – and doing so using an online citation index like Google Scholar is extremely time- and cost-prohibitive – then there is the possibility for systemic abuse in order to benefit the applicant during the hiring process or the academic department during budget and resource allocation.
Citation count isn’t necessarily indicative of sound scholarship, either, as a disproportionate number of articles citing the original article may be devoted to pointing out logical flaws, statistical errors, or missing data. While critiques are sure to exist for almost any prominent academic work, this is not problematic so long as their citations aren’t being used for funding or employment practices. However, if they are, this counting flaw should be addressed as well.
In theory, the notion of using citation figures to help contextualise decisions about how to fund a department or hire a new professor is understandable – universities are competing with each other like never before for researchers, recognition in shrinking numbers of publications that choose from thousands of submissions, and international academic status in a saturated secondary education market. However, when the time comes for that notion to be put into practice, its many problematic elements become evident. If universities are to outlive the short lifespan of the various technologies and social media they so astutely employ in their efforts to raise their profiles, then they must ensure their academics don’t stoop to research that is easily released and quickly out-dated as well.
Produced by Kindred Motes, CRESI Research and Publicity Associate.