Publication standards are different between disciplines. Traditionally, a materials chemist publishes many times more papers than a structural biologist. With a metric like that, you run whole sub-disciplines out of town.

Reminds me of a theater professor I know who was having trouble meeting the new rigorous rules for tenure.

Publish? What and where exactly?

If it means that some academics are choosing to cite their own papers rather than keeping up to date on the literature of their field, there's likely to be some potential insights missed.

There's no reason to assume that adding a self cite affects how much they read others.

Not self-citing in incremental work would be like a software team erasing commit history at the beginning of each sprint, claiming that it's all new code. The post-metric amount of self citing might be less misleading than what they did before.

People who are rewarded are the people most cited, even if they are citing themselves.

Think that’s producing the best scientific results?

> Think that’s producing the best scientific results?

That's a strawman. The answer you were looking for is, "I don't know". I don't know either.

I’d say it makes Publish or perish even worse:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_or_perish