Citation Metrics and Highly Ranked Scholars: Spinning the Myth of Meritocracy

An Epidemic of the Quantified SelfRejection, or recommendation of self-improvement, is a quotidian aspect of academics' working life.But personal endorsement -particularly of the kind that is unsolicited -that you're doing things right, comes as a welcome if abrupt and uncertain relief.It's a relief in helping to deflect, however fleetingly, myriad feelings of imposterism (Wilkinson 2020) and outsiderism (Khadka et al. 2018).It's a relief also in being able to take a break from having to constantly justify your professional worth: something academics have in more recent times become especially accustomed to (cf.Shore and Wright 2015; Watermeyer 2019).Academics operate within a prestige economy (Blackmore 2015) where competition is fetishised (Naidoo 2015), where their work is (increasingly) intensive and precarious and debilitating to personal health and well-being (Burton and Bowman 2022;Hartman and Darab 2012;Morrish 2019;Watermeyer et al. 2021), and where, largely without exception, they are subjugated by the drumbeat of hyperperformativity and managerial expectation (Macfarlane 2019).Self-promotion has become an integral dimension of who academics are and what they do.Where they fail to 'play-the-game', the penalty is severe (Watermeyer and Olssen 2016).