Interactions as a paramount existential principle and the scientists who do not exist

“Quantum physics does not describe how things are, but how things interact with one another. So, I think this is general. Even we human beings — I’m not a thing. I’m a net of interactions with the world around me, with the people who know me, who love me. It’s a more powerful way of trying to grasp reality by focusing on what interacts with what and how, and somehow, the objects are just the nodes of interactions“. Physicist Carlo Rovelli

In this context, it is particularly pertinent to emphasise the importance of comprehensively assessing the collaborative footprint of scientists. While it is relatively straightforward to quantify direct interactions, such as co-authorships recorded on platforms like Scopus, a truly holistic evaluation requires moving beyond these immediate connections. Of central importance is the identification of both direct and indirect forms of engagement, which encompass not only the number of Mendeley readers and metrics provided by tools such as PlumX (via Scopus) and Altmetrics (via Publons) but, above all, citations, which have been shown to exhibit a strong correlation with recognition at the highest levels of scientific achievement, including Nobel Prizes. https://clarivate.com/citation-laureates/hall-of-citation-laureates/

Regrettably, the contemporary system of scholarly recognition is organized in such a way that it frequently—and perhaps disproportionately—assigns primary importance to the publication of research in high-impact journals, treating this as the dominant, if not exclusive, criterion for evaluating a researcher’s merit. This prevailing emphasis often operates with minimal regard for the actual influence, reach, or practical relevance of the work within the broader scientific community. By privileging the prestige of the publication venue over the substantive content, originality, or empirical contribution of the research itself, this evaluative framework risks conflating mere visibility with genuine scientific significance. Consequently, researchers who maintain minimal engagement with the scientific community—and who, in the words of the physicist Carlo Rovelli, do not exist in the communal sense—may nonetheless receive considerable recognition and career advancement, not in proportion to the value of their contributions, but primarily on the basis of having succeeded in publishing in prominent journals.