Publishing local articles and book chapters: A gamer's shortcut to promotion in a metric-based academic system

Abstract

Turkish academic promotion rules that took effect in 2016 completed the metrification of the promotion regime and turned performance evaluations into a mechanical publication counting exercise. We argue that the lack of judgemental depth and quality emphasis in metric-based career rules incentivize gaming behaviour. This paper utilizes the near population of active associate professors in T & uuml;rkiye's Business, Economics, International Relations, Political Science, and Public Finance departments (n = 1822) to show that social scientists demonstrate a nominal compliance with the promotion rules, focus on easily produced research outputs to accumulate publication points with minimal effort, oversaturate the metrics and promote faster. We document that over 95% of the overall scientific output at promotion consists of local articles and book chapters that can be produced with little effort, whereas more demanding international articles in Social Sciences Citation Index and Scopus journals are rare and symbolic. Overall, there is a strong association between fast promotion and fast accumulation of publication points, and local articles and book chapters have considerably greater acceleration impact on promotion than that of international articles. Results illustrate the extent of exploitation and transformation that take place when hollow performance metrics are instrumentalized at the national scale.