Ye Sun, Fabio Caccioli, Xiancheng Li and Giacomo Livan;
Rankings are ubiquitous: every week, lists of best-selling records, movies, and books are released, and in sports like tennis, athletes are ranked based on their performance in major tournaments. While we know there is more to a song, book, or movie than its sales figures, we are drawn to rankings because they simplify complexity. They reduce a multidimensional concept like success into simple ordered lists.
In academia, citation-based metrics have come to serve a similar function. With platforms like Clarivate and Google Scholar, measuring an author’s performance through citations has become a common practice, whether we like it or not. In some countries, these bibliometric indicators have even started to dictate career progression, making citations an informal currency of success.