New Zealander Nigel Richards has won the French Scrabble championship twice. What’s more remarkable than double wins is that Nigel doesn’t speak French. He applied his prodigious brain to the task of memorising words from the French dictionary, bypassing the need for understanding.
In 2022, The Lancet medical journal achieved a feat that has parallels with Nigel’s Scrabble win. It achieved the highest ‘impact factor’ of any scientific journal in history. This number does not measure noble goals such as improvements in the length or quality of life. Instead, impact factor is a numbers game tangential to the purpose of medical research. Like Nigel’s Scrabble game, it is success without substance.
The impact factor is calculated using the total number of times scientists have referenced papers from the journal, so it measures attention, both good and bad. The average journal article in medicine gets 15 citations over 10 years. As an example of bad attention, The Lancet’s famously discredited study that linked the MMR vaccine to autism has more than 1,800 citations.
