You don't say. "Cliques of mathematicians at institutions in China, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere have been artificially boosting their colleagues’ citation counts by churning out low-quality papers that repeatedly reference their work... " www.science.org/content/arti...

Goodhart's law "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes."

>"There were people that published in journals that no serious mathematician reads, whose work was cited by articles that no serious mathematicians would read, coming from institutions that nobody knows in mathematics,” he says. — a very good representation of the issue for the general audience.

H/T @ikashnitsky.phd for sending me this gem

I. Am. Shocked.