Mario Biagioli, a distinguished professor of law and communication at the University of California, Los Angeles — and a pioneering thinker about how academic reward systems incentivize misconduct — passed away in May after a long illness. He was 69.
Among other intellectual interests, Biagioli wrote frequently about the (presumably) unintended consequences of using metrics such as citations to measure the quality and impact of published papers, and thereby the prestige of their authors and institutions.
“It is no longer enough for scientists to publish their work. The work must be seen to have an influential shelf life,” Biagioli wrote in Nature in 2016. “This drive for impact places the academic paper at the centre of a web of metrics — typically, where it is published and how many times it is cited — and a good score on these metrics becomes a goal that scientists and publishers are willing to cheat for.”
Such cheating takes the form of faking peer reviews, coercing citations, faking coauthors, or buying authorship on papers, among other tactics described in the 2020 book Gaming the Metrics: Misconduct and Manipulation in Academic Research, which Biagioli edited with Alexandra Lippman.
“Mario saw the increasing reliance of metrics within scholarship, and their gaming, not simply as a moral problem but rather as an intellectual problem,” said Lippman, whom Biagioli mentored in a postdoctoral fellowship. “Mario was interested in how the gaming of metrics fundamentally changed academic misconduct from epistemic crime – old fashioned fraud – to a bureaucratic one – the post-production manipulation of impact.”
Lippman and Biagioli organized a conference at the University of California, Davis, in 2016 on the topic, from which the book Gaming the Metrics followed. “To create a serious conversation about this new issue, Mario invited not only historians of science, computer scientists, anthropologists and other scholars but also misconduct watchdogs and other practitioners from the trenches to share their research, expertise and perspectives,” Lippman said.
That conference “can be considered the moment when the milieu of the new style science watchdogs, to which belongs Retraction Watch, was launched,” said Emmanuel Didier, a sociologist and research director at the National Centre for Scientific Research in France. “It was the first time everyone met the other,” said Didier, who participated in the meeting.
Biagioli “had high expectations for excellence, a strong sense of adventure, and a constant twinkle in his eye along with a biting sense of humor,” Lippman said. He was “an expansive thinker,” she said, and his intellectual legacy “is also expansive through his work not only on scholarly metrics and misconduct but also on scholarly credit, intellectual property, copyright, academic brands, and scientific authorship.”
Biagioli earned his Ph.D. in the history of science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989. Before joining the UCLA faculty in 2019, he taught at many institutions, including Harvard University, Stanford, and UC Davis, where he founded the Center for Science and Innovation Studies. His books addressing the history of science include Galileo, Courtier, published in 1993.
“I learned something from every conversation I had with Mario, and everything of his I read,” said our Ivan Oransky. “His way of looking at the structure of academia and scholarly publishing was unique, bracing, and constructive.”
Biagioli’s idea that “the article has become more like a vector and recipient of citations than a medium for the communication of content” is “a guide to what research assessment has become,” Oransky said. “He is already missed.”
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I am very sorry to hear about Mario’s passing. Indeed, he’s already missed.
I was at that 2016 meeting and met him, I learned so much there and it was really fun to meet people I had only heard about online. Like I was sitting next to Cyril Labbé at dinner and started explaining that there was this guy who could detect SciGen papers – and he smiles and said: yes, that’s me. There were some quite radical proposals made at that meeting that should have been tried out. Mario really contributed to making the “watchdogs” stronger! May his memory be a blessing!