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Over‑reliance on citation metrics: what gets lost?
Citation counts are widely used to evaluate research output. Yet high‑citation papers are not always the most rigorous, and solid niche work may get very few citations. How should we interpret citation numbers sensibly?
Dylan Rogers, Donald Thomas and 24 others6 Comments-
Citation counts are heavily biased toward popular hot topics; high‑quality niche work suffers unfairly.
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Self‑citations and citation rings can artificially inflate numbers, so do not treat metrics as absolute truth.
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Reading the actual content remains irreplaceable; metrics are only secondary helper signals.
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Newly published papers naturally have low citations, regardless of their inherent quality.
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Review papers tend to collect far more citations than original technical contributions.
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Many hiring and funding bodies still over‑simplify evaluation using raw citation numbers.
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