A further issue is peer review quid pro quo corruption. The reviewer loves your paper but requests one small change: cite some of his papers and he’ll approve your paper.
I don’t know how prevalent this sort of corruption is (I haven’t read any statistical investigations) but I have heard of researchers complaining about it. In all likelihood it’s extremely prevalent in less reputable journals but for all we know it could be happening at the big ones.
The whole issue of citations functioning like a currency recalls Goodhart’s Law [1]:
”When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
Tbh I used to have an issue with that but these days it really is a small issue in the grand scheme of things. You can say No but also, there are larger systemic problems in science.
I don’t know how prevalent this sort of corruption is (I haven’t read any statistical investigations) but I have heard of researchers complaining about it. In all likelihood it’s extremely prevalent in less reputable journals but for all we know it could be happening at the big ones.
The whole issue of citations functioning like a currency recalls Goodhart’s Law [1]:
”When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law