Legitimacy-importance arbitrage in academia might be an issue.
The standard story for how academia became Like That is something like this.
Grantmakers give out money based on citations
Therefore academics goodhart on citations
Therefore they all pressure each other to cite irrelevant pieces of work during e.g. peer review
Steps 1 and 2 are mostly right, but step 3 isn’t quite right. A lot of the time, academics cite irrelevant work to make their own publications look more important. If your work is in some obscure corner of chlorate chemistry (sorry to chlorate chemists) then you can make it look better by citing some other piece of work which is only tangentially related to yours (say, how a brominated compound has anti-cancer properties (in mice)) then your paper looks better, even if that work is dubious. If your chlorate paper is entirely legitimate but also not that relevant, you’re lending credibility to the brominated mouse-cancer guys. There’s an arbitrage opportunity where one group makes dubious but cool claims, and another makes solid but boring claims, and the two of them cite each other to give a false impression that the field is both cool and solid.
Legitimacy-importance arbitrage in academia might be an issue.
The standard story for how academia became Like That is something like this.
Grantmakers give out money based on citations
Therefore academics goodhart on citations
Therefore they all pressure each other to cite irrelevant pieces of work during e.g. peer review
Steps 1 and 2 are mostly right, but step 3 isn’t quite right. A lot of the time, academics cite irrelevant work to make their own publications look more important. If your work is in some obscure corner of chlorate chemistry (sorry to chlorate chemists) then you can make it look better by citing some other piece of work which is only tangentially related to yours (say, how a brominated compound has anti-cancer properties (in mice)) then your paper looks better, even if that work is dubious. If your chlorate paper is entirely legitimate but also not that relevant, you’re lending credibility to the brominated mouse-cancer guys. There’s an arbitrage opportunity where one group makes dubious but cool claims, and another makes solid but boring claims, and the two of them cite each other to give a false impression that the field is both cool and solid.