Gaming Metrics Before the Game: Citation and the Bureaucratic Virtuoso

Abstract

Watch out for goal displacement: Whenever an indicator comes to be used in the reward system of an organization or institutional domain, there develop tendencies to manipulate the indicator so that it no longer indicates what it once did. Now that more and more scientists and scholars are becom-ing acutely conscious of citations as a form of behavior, some will begin, in semi- organized fashion, to work out citation- arrangements in their own little specialties.