I need money to do research, available grants require achieving specific measurable results during the grant (mostly publications fitting specific criteria e.g. "journal that's rated above 50% of average citation rating in your subfield" or "peer reviewed publication that's indexed in SCOPUS or WebOfScience", definitely not a preprint or blog), and getting one is also conditional on earlier publications like that.

In essence, the evaluators (non-scientific organizations who fund scientific organizations) need some metric to compare and distinguish decent research from weak, one that's (a) comparable across fields of science; (b) verifiable by people outside that field (so you can compare across subfields); (c) not trivially changeable by the funded institutions themselves; (d) describable in an objective manner so that you can write up the exact criteria/metrics in a legal act or contract. There are NO reasonable metrics that fit these criteria; international peer-reviewed-publications fitting certain criteria are bad but perhaps least bad from the (even worse) alternatives like direct evaluation by government committees.

Simple cetacean count of the paper itself is probably a better metric than journal, though it’s certainly not perfect either.

(I am leaving cetacean cunt in because it’s a funny autocorrect.)

(And now I’m leaving the above in, because it’s even funnier. Both genuine.)

When you are looking for a job, are up for promotion/tenure, or applying for grants, a long publication record in prestigious journals is helpful.

Metrics. You can’t manage what you can’t measure!

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." - Marilyn Strathern

At some point, there's not going to be enough budget for both the football coach and the Latin philology professor. We should hire another three layers of housing diversity deans just to be safe.