Sometime in the late 20th century, early 21st century, the way of doing science changed: if you wanted to have an academic career, you had to publish what in academia are called “papers”; and the number of “documents” released and the citations received for the “documents” began to determine who has access to grants and funding; the rationale behind this method is that a highly cited “document” will, by definition, be more important to the community. than a less cited article.
Science has never worked like this, especially since an idea that nobody cares about at a given moment can become, a decade later, the hinge on which a revolution is built. The crude method of counting citations and mentions is just another example of the blind quantification that has taken over the world: we get out of an Uber and give stars to the driver, we measure the quality of a programmer by the number of lines of code written.
But there are other universes where quoting isn’t meant to be an objective measure of anything and works as a tribute – counting these quotes doesn’t serve to measure any other quality, except the number of people who, without asking for anything in return, decided to honor someone. someone. And there’s no better example of that than musicians using a song to declare their love for someone else’s work – and, in that sense, there can’t be people as generous as Brazilians.
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Source: Observadora
