Publish or perish at least produces some hilarious author names

Hoover, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, had tried unsuccessfully to get a paper published in two leading journals. So he added a co-author from a prestigious-sounding institute, the Institute for Advanced Studies at Palermo, Sicily, and resubmitted the work. Sure enough, the paper was accepted and published. He did this several times with the same result. But the name Hoover chose—Stronzo Bestiale—was a sly tell: In Italian, it means “giant asshole.” And yet Bestiale remains in the scientific literature, just like Hoss Cartwright. So does Galadriel Mirkwood, an Afghan hound that belonged to biologist Polly Matzinger of the National Institutes of Health. She was fed up with the use of passive voice in scientific papers, and decided to add her pup’s name to a paper in protest.

In astronomy the use of the passive voice is severely frowned upon... errr, I mean, we hates it, precious ! We hates it !

It’s tempting to laugh off some of these antics, which seem driven by ego and self-interest. But they also underscore a painful truth: Unless the evaluation of scientists—and the all-important doling out of funding—can be wrenched away from bean-counting metrics, history is likely to repeat itself. Tomorrow’s metrics gamers may come up with some other ruse, and spoofers like Morgenstern will invent the next Hoss Cartwright in response. Taking time to read and evaluate a selection of a job applicant’s papers takes far more time than plugging a bunch of numbers in to a matrix. But it’s precisely that output, not metrics, that science is supposed to be about. The agencies that fund grants and committees that hire and promote academic researchers need to get back to doing the hard job of assessing the value and quality of candidates’ scientific work rather than leaning on the crutch of overly simplified publication metrics.

It's the over-reliance on simplified metrics that's the problem here. A publication record is a useful thing, but relying on sheer numbers is a terrible idea. Hence my previous suggestion of a more nuanced journal/publication ranking system, where one could see how many papers of particular types and review quality a researcher has. Even then, to rely entirely on numbers would be a fatal mistake, because you can't quantify research quality. It's fundamentally impossible. All you can do is to try and make the current system better.

http://nautil.us/issue/42/fakes/why-fake-data-when-you-can-fake-a-scientist