The Political Economy of Knowledge: Navigating Scientometric Enthusiasm amidst Political and Economic Forces Shaping the Production and Dissemination of Scientific Knowledge

While we witness heightened enthusiasm in certain peripheral areas of scientific production regarding scientometric standards, there are increasingly pressing issues concerning how the ideal of objective and rational science is being called into question. In this article, I contrast the enthusiasm for the "prestige" of top-tier journals with the increasingly urgent problems related to the lack of independence of researchers and scientific research itself in a world dominated by security institutions and corporations. While many authors rush to blame postmodernists for the lack of trust in science, recent studies in the history of science reveal an increased role of security institutions and corporations in shaping what we call scientific truth. The ahistorical perspective of pure and objective scientific truth is rather an ideal, and enthusiasm for the scientometric apparatus measuring the quality and merits of scientific research is rather misplaced and tends to support a system where scientific knowledge is increasingly subservient to objectives other than the pursuit of truth.