Comment on Will Article Promotion Companies Make Article-Level Metrics Obsolete ? by David Solomon

This is a problem but not surprising. You see it with every high stakes assessment situation. The higher the stakes, the more people will try to cheat and game the measure whether it is administrators and teachers manipulating test student standardized test scores or journal editors/publishers playing citation games to increase their impact factor. It’s an arms race between those trying to game the measure and those trying to keep it valid.