The "Dark Side" of Academics? Emerging Issues in the Gaming and Manipulation of Metrics in Higher Education

The dramatic expansion of the use of metrics in higher education institutions worldwide has brought with it gaming and manipulation practices designed to enhance artificially both individual and institutional reputation, including coercive citation, forced joint authorship, ghostwriting, H-index manipulation, and many others. This article maps these emerging practices from a social action system perspective and analyzes their linkages with the norms and processes that support academic celebrity and stardom as well as the character of academic systems. It analyzes with a social system approach some recently-proposed strategies for containing the proliferations of these practices and for mitigating their negative impacts.