True, but I feel like abuse would be fairly obvious and grant panels would know if someone is gaming the system. The panels, at least in my former field, are composed mostly of people who know who’s doing what in their field. If they saw a high citation count they would know if that was legitimate. If anything, faking citations would be shameful and embarrassing for most people.
If grants are tied to the “score” there is an incentive to abuse the system.
and similarly, any metric tied to a reward is no longer a metric worth measuring for the purposes of maintaining system health
True, but I feel like abuse would be fairly obvious and grant panels would know if someone is gaming the system. The panels, at least in my former field, are composed mostly of people who know who’s doing what in their field. If they saw a high citation count they would know if that was legitimate. If anything, faking citations would be shameful and embarrassing for most people.