The first time I heard about the impact factor I was a few weeks into my PhD. A candidate due to finish in a couple of months warned me emphatically: “It makes or breaks careers.” In my innocence, I didn’t think much about it and returned to concentrating on my research. A decade later, metrics such as these came to dominate my work and ultimately drove me to give up my permanent academic post and move into industry.
Since leaving academia, I have found myself wondering about the effect of these metrics on the profession and practice of science.
There is a well-known anecdote about British rule in India. In Delhi, officials were concerned that there were too many cobras. To reduce their population, people were paid for each cobra killed. When the administrators found out that some people had started to breed cobras to kill them and collect the reward, they stopped the scheme. The farmed cobras were set free, causing the population to explode.
This is the so-called cobra effect, which describes how incentives in complex systems can have unintended consequences which exacerbate the problem they were trying to solve.
