Greedy scientists: Publish or Perish culture in academic world
This is a good article on how even good scientists are trapped in to greedy ambitions of increasing the quantity of papers over quality.
In the academic world, the golden rule today in last 2-3 decades is publish or perish. It was made in good intent to encourage publishing and to bring the good work from the private tables to open world but as usual anything in this world gets distorted when it gets to practice.
In academic world, it is always about publishing and some inflate or manufacture those numbers in selective journals and many universities hire such crooked professors to boost their rankings.
I have personally seen some professors and ran away from them, when I was 18 during my college days, I went to a professor thinking maybe I can also add a paper to my name by being with him (that's a crooked desire to increase my self worth) and then the way he welcomed me with a smile and asked me to tweak certain paper to get published quickly, I know this is a crooked whale who plagiarizes and dumps paper after paper with no substance. He knows he is doing academic dishonesty but he is empowered by the university management to keep doing it, to boost it's rank and get more funding and brand-name. But eventually, at higher stage of academic circle, we all know the professor and institution that did this cringe, is nothing but a pile of garbage. That's the way of living for some folks.
Afterwards, I met several fellow peers and professors who are very honest and they showed me over years how to peel the garbage and uncover the garbage in published papers, like requesting for raw data of experiment or simulation graph (some copy the graph from other papers), questioning the improper citations (to boost their friend's or their own citation number) and comparing all their previous papers and second authors to see how much is original and how much is beating around the bush. Some are also selling the authorship or studies for thousands of dollars in WhatsApp or telegram groups. I am aware of this crap happening across countries and universities happening.
Everytime a metric comes to track and reward the merit, humanity perverts it.
The Google scholar is the golden metric for professors and academicians to track and reward them. Some are genuine and some are corrupt. Based on the content of one's psyche one will be attracted to respective professors: less prolific but genuine or highly prolific but crap.
Here are some link of Google scholars, one can feel by looking the respective papers and their citations and the citation index over years.
https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=aAjK-qAAAAAJ&hl=en
Google scholar is a great tool and definite gauge for every academician to see the impact of their work.
