A Security Perspective on Publication Metrics

The importance of publication metrics, such as the h-index [9], has increased dramatically in recent years. Unfortunately, as Goodhart [7] already remarked: “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. And indeed: hiring, grants and tenure decisions depend more and more on performing well in publication metrics. This leads to a perverse incentive for individual researchers and journals to “optimise” their perfomance. However, such behaviour undermines the utility of the measure itself, in the extreme case nullifying its value. The underlying cause is that besides the functional requirements on a measurement, there are also security requirements on them. As is often the case, these security objectives remain implicit. In this paper, we provide a much-needed security perspective on publication metrics.