Increased Pressure Leads to Stronger Motives for Abuse
Most of the potential issues we discuss next stem from the added
pressure that the new ranking system would apply to law schools. Other
disciplines already deal with this type of pressure.
197
In at least one case,
attempts to manipulate rankings have led to criminal charges.
198
This
increased pressure is also evidenced by the significant number of
articles on factors influencing citations in non-legal fields
199
and by
some of the negative practices, like “coercive citation,” that occur with
surprising regularity in other fields.
200
Further, how to “game” ranking
systems has become a popular topic in interdisciplinary ranking systems
like Google Scholar.
201
More troubling, scientists in a focus group said,
“competition contributes to strategic game-playing in science, a decline
in free and open sharing of information and methods, sabotage of
others’ ability to use one’s work, interference with peer-review
197
See Georg Franck, Scientific Communication – A Vanity Fair?, 286 SCI. 53 (1999)
(discussing how scientists’ desire for citations motivates the formation of “citation cartels”),
and Maarten van Wesel, Evaluation by Citation: Trends in Publication Behavior, Evaluation
Criteria, and the Strive for High Impact Publications, 22 SCI. & ENG’G ETHICS 199, 203
(2016) [hereinafter van Wesel, Evaluation by Citation] (listing tactics employed in other fields
to increase citation counts, including: “artificially inflating the author count, adding
unnecessary references, and purposely making the abstract hard to read”).
198
Scott Jaschik, Ex-Dean at Temple Indicted on Charges of Manipulating Rankings, INSIDE
HIGHER ED (April 19, 2021),
https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2021/04/19/ex-dean-temple-indicted-
charges-manipulating-rankings [https://perma.cc/9VFP-ME5P].
199
See, e.g., van Wesel et al., supra note 1 (discussing causes of citations and collecting
citations to prior studies).
200
Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Two-thirds of Researchers Report ‘Pressure to Cite’ in Nature
Poll, NATURE (Oct. 1, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-02922-9
[https://perma.cc/H78S-YEA4].
201
Emilio Delgado López-Cózar, Nicolás Robinson-García & Daniel Torres-Salinas,
Manipulating Google Scholar Citations and Google Scholar Metrics: Simple, Easy and
Tempting (Cornell Univ. Computer Sci., EC3 Working Papers 6, 2012),
https://arxiv.org/abs/1212.0638 (demonstrating how researchers can easily manipulate their
Google Scholar h-index); How to Successfully Boost Your H-Index, ENAGO ACAD. (Nov. 4,
2019), https://www.enago.com/academy/how-to-successfully-boost-your-h-index/
[https://perma.cc/6XL6-3BFN] (discussing more legitimate ways authors can improve their h-
index).