Nowadays, many science organizers, stakeholders etc. make decisions about financing and individual careers on the basis of metrics, including citation statistics. I regard this as a misuse of bibliometrics and scientometry which were developed for the analysis of trends in science and not for evaluating individual researchers. It also opens the door for fraud, manipulations etc. See this interesting paper with criticism of the current misuse of citation analysis: How scientometry is killing science, https://www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/archive/24/12/pdf/i1052-5173-24-12-44.pdf

See also these discussions (including my replies):

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Petition_Stop_Tracking_Science/1

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Your_opinion_about_the_following_link/1

https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_do_you_think_about_scientific_production_evaluation_indices_such_as_those_of_Hirsch_h_or_Google_Scholar_i10_or_others/1

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Research_Publications_Impact_factor_H-Index_I-Index_Is_these_words_becoming_root_cause_for_stress_nowadays_rather_than_Passionate/1

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Why_do_bibliometric_studies_get_so_much_attention_in_todays_world_of_academia/1

Dear Wolfgang R. Dick,

Thank you for your precious comment.

Retractionwatch show how you can boost your scores with help from Researchgate, google and some fake papers with self citations. Larry the office cat now has an h-score of 14!

https://reeserichardson.blog/2024/07/18/engineering-the-worlds-highest-cited-cat-larry/

Dear John Brian Jones,

Thanks for your comment with an important link to the topic. By the way, Google Scholar reduced citations after Larry was exposed, but there may still be many Larrys that have not been exposed.

Hello Dr Şahin Emrah Amrahov

I totally agree that these measures are having an impact on quality. I think that using and manipulating this is unethical but unfortunately increasingly common.