Playing the citations game: From publish or perish to be cited or sidelined

•This paper suggests that Australian universities are moving towards a culture where simple metrics are to be used to assess research quality and standing. Citations are becoming one such favoured metric.•Thus, midcareer and senior marketing academics need to link their citation profile to their research strategy in order to better market their scholarly contribution to their university and their peers.•Simple citation metrics do a poor job of this exercise because they obscure how different research strategies generate citations.•After briefly reviewing what citations actually measure I use the profile of four Australian marketing scholars to illustrate four different citation profiles and research stories.•Because universities have yet to dictate how citation metrics will be used it is opportune for individual academics to explore different ways in which they might craft their own research story.

The availability of automated citation counting software has made it easy for citation metrics to be used in the performance appraisal of many academics. This is most evident in decisions about promotion, research funding and salary supplementation. At present, many marketing academics seem to have only a passing interest in how their citations may impact on these decisions. Notwithstanding their limitations, citations can play an important role in building a case for the career advancement of most academics. The questions addressed in this paper are twofold. First, is seeking more citations a somewhat distracting game to be played across one's career or do they provide a reasonably valid measure of research recognition? Second, given that their use is becoming more widespread, how can a scholar's citation profile be linked to their research strategy so that it enhances rather than obscures their contribution? In the language of branding the task is how best to use citations as a point-of-proof of research contribution. Data from the Australian marketing community is used to illustrate how this can be achieved.

Chinese abstract自动引用计数软件的问世，更便于在学术绩效评估中使用引用率指标。在制定有关晋升、科研经费和工资补贴等决策时，其重要性尤其明显。目前，许多营销学者似乎都不太关注自己论著的引用率对上述决策的影响。尽管有其局限性，学术论著引用率仍然在大多数学者的职业发展中起到重要作用。本文提出了两大问题。首先，在整个职业生涯中，蓄意寻求更高的引用率，某种程度上是否算是偏失了论著的初衷？引用频次是否能合理有效地评估学术地位？其次，鉴于论著引用率的应用已经越来越广泛，学者的论著引用频次该如何与其科研战略链接起来，从而加以正面利用，提高学者的学术贡献？从品牌推广的角度看，那就是，如何最佳利用论著引用率，让其成为学术研究贡献的证据。本文采用澳大利亚营销界的数据，来说明如何实现这一目标。