Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database

There's countless numbers of scientists that made great strides working on topics others deemed rediculous. Heck, many of the Nobel prize winners were ridiculed by their colleagues as borderline wack-jobs at the time they were working on their research. Even after winning the prize, some still were with their later work (Crick's search for consciousness comes to mind, and why it would be so worthless a search does not).

If anything, the hubris of the scientific community would be as deafening as the pseudo-science BS and hold back progress just as much if not more except for one key thing: the scientific method.

Luckily, we have a process by which crackpots get differentiated from geniuses. So let's not leave $20 on the ground assuming others would have picked it up, especially when that $20 represents collective progress for the entire species.

But my work is incremental, and I obviously don't want to repeat what I said in a different paper, so I cite earlier work in later work. TBH, I don't think it's possible to avoid self-citation unless:

1. Your research is so popular that by the time you need to cite it, it's been surveyed, or improved upon, or otherwise adapted. 2. You switch research subjects relatively often. 3. You publish "blocks" of work, each based on fundamentals in your field established by others - and they're not incremental.

The main problem is that there is an objective need (or desire?) by various stakeholders to have some kind of metric that they can use to roughly evaluate the quality or quantity of scientist's work, with the caveat people outside your field need to be able to use it. I.e. let's assume that we have a university or government official that for some valid reason (there are many of them) needs to be able to compare two mathematicians without spending excessive time on it. Let's assume that the official is honest, competent and in fact is a scientist him/herself and so can do the evaluation "in the way that scientists want" - but that official happens to be, say, a biologist or a linguist. What process should be used? How should that person distinguish insigtful, groundbreaking novel and important research from pseudoscience or salami-sliced paper that's not bringing anything new to the field? I can evaluate papers and people in my research subfield, but not far outside of it. Peer review for papers exists because we consider that people outside of the field are not qualified to directly tell whether that paper is good or bad.

The other problem, of course, is how do you compare between fields - what data allows you to see that (for example) your history department is doing top-notch research but your economics department is not respected in their field?

I'm not sure that a good measurement can exist, and despite all their deep flaws it seems that we actually can't do much better than the currently used bibliographic metrics and judgement by proxy of journal ratings.

Saying "metric X is bad" doesn't mean "metric X shouldn't get used" unless a better solution is available.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_or_perish