Uh, what? She's a researcher and this is a Google research division. A 1000 citations is a large number for any single paper, even in ML. And yes, even inside Google research, this aspect of impact plays a big role in evaluation of researchers.

1000 citations is A LOT. I think the person you're responding to is that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Popular people get quoted regardless if their paper is actually impactful and that it's, unfortunately, often a popularity contest. People are lazy and only read/cite popular papers

I work in research, and citation count, especially of a single paper, is such a dumb metric for evaluating performance. There are about a million reasons that one paper gets cited over another that don’t have to do with quality.

Does the same paper get 1000+ citations if it were published in 2010? Or even 2015? Probably not.

It's an original research paper (not review) and it was published in 2018. So yes, 1000 citations at the very least conveys that it was noticed and had an impact.

Also, anyone who works in the field of AI fairness and ethics research knows about it. So yeah, it's an important study.

Andrew Wakefield's paper which started the anti vax movement got much more citations than that.

What does that tell you?

Attention != quality. Especially not the type of quality that keeps one from getting fired after publicly badmouthing ones boss.

As far as I can see, the only way she would keep her job, is if her research was so fundamental to the company that they literally could not function without her. Citations don’t tell you that. My boss is a star researcher in his field with multiple 1000+ citation papers. He still has to act respectfully of his boss and peers.