One of the main currencies for academics is citations. For better or worse, reputation, funding, jobs and promotions ride on publications and citations. It’s popular to use citation based metrics such as the h-index to rank people. Highly cited papers increase a journals impact factor, making the journal desirable to publish in, and in turn, publishing in high-impact journals increases the perceived importance of the work and researcher …
The h-index itself is an interesting metric of performance that’s all the rage with job-selection and promotion committees at the moment. Essentially if you list someones publications ranked in decreasing order of citations, the h-index is the size of the largest square you could draw under that graph. Why a square? Who cares, arbitrary metrics answer to no one. It’s popular. Deal with it. The interesting point is that there’s often only a couple of papers that define the top right corner of the square and a couple of extra citations there will bump up the h-index.
The trouble is, despite their influence, citations are a pretty crude measure of how important a piece of work is. Any context to the citation is lost, all citations contribute equally (you can’t anti-cite a work, or add weight to a given citation - a citation from a grad student is as good as one from a Nobel laureate). In fact, for many researchers doing the citations is seen as a chore rather than a bestowing of praise, and there is a tendency to just copy the introduction to a field and all its citations from a previous work (research[1] shows citation errors tend to propagate). The take home message is that you have an enormous amount of flexibility in what you cite.
So, here is a wonderful evil idea. Why not set up a citation trading system? All you need is a website and access to citation data.
Here is the simplest way it could work. Every time you get cited by someone you owe them a citation. You can pay them back by citing some of their work - remember you have a lot of flexibility in what you cite. To make it interesting, citing particular papers can be worth more or less depending on whether they help bump up the h-index of an author.
These citation balances can be calculated automatically and made available on a website which can be viewed anonymously, so no one need know you’re playing the system. The citation worth of a paper is also an automatic calculation from citation data.
Researchers will develop different credit ratings (how well they repay their debts). Someone with a great credit rating is a great person to cite as they are much more likely to cite your work in return.
Hell, even just having an up-to-date list of the boundary papers for someones h-index would be great - here a single citation could land them a promotion: what a nice way of giving someone a pat on the back.
[1] If you don’t have access to my high-impact souce take a look on the arxiv