Fake Scientists on Editorial Boards Can Significantly Enhance the Visibility of Junk Journals

Abstract

veniently “measure” the performance of scientists and research institutes without actually looking at the research work that is to be “measured.” As Barbour and Stell put it in their contribution to this volume (chapter 11), metrics are “attempts to measure the unmeasurable.” Some absurd consequences of these attempts have been discussed in the previous chapters of this book. Metrics are frequently criticized for being “unfair” or for “distorting” the thing that is to be measured, and there is much debate about alternative metrics that might be more appropriate than the metrics that are currently in use (Jennifer Lin, this volume, chapter 16). In contrast to this viewpoint, I want to argue here that it is fundamentally impossible to measure research work quantitatively. Comparing things quantitatively to each other assumes that they are, in principle, of the same quality. One can, for example, compare the weights of physical objects to each other, since they have the same quality mass. But one cannot quantitatively compare the weight of one object to, say, the color or the speed of another object, since weight, color, and speed are different qualities. Similarly, one can compare the productivity of workers that are doing, in principle, the same type of work. One can say, for example, that surgeon A carries out ten percent more operations per year, with a given success rate, than does her colleague, surgeon B, under similar conditions. But things are different if it comes to research work— at least if we are talking about basic research. Research is about discoveries, inventions, and thoughts that are, by their nature, novel and different from previous discoveries, inventions, or thoughts. It is thus impossible to compare research results quantitatively to each other. It would be utterly absurd to say that, for example, the discovery of the citric acid cycle is five times more than Ukkonen’s proof that the suffix tree for a string of characters can be calculated in linear time. 15 Fake Scientists on Editorial Boards Can Significantly Enhance the Visibility of Junk Journals