At the technical heart of this system sits the h-index, introduced by physicist Jorge Hirsch in 2005 as a single-number summary of an individual’s scientific output. A researcher has an h-index of h if h of their papers have each been cited at least h times. The elegance of the formula is precisely what made it so seductive: it rewards both productivity and sustained citation impact while damping the influence of one or two runaway hits. But comparative studies have repeatedly shown that the same researcher can return strikingly different h-values depending on the database used to compute it, because Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar differ enormously in their journal coverage and citation harvesting. Bar-Ilan’s classic comparison of the three databases demonstrated these discrepancies empirically, and later work by Singh and colleagues quantified just how divergent the coverage of Web of Science, Scopus, and Dimensions really is, with Scopus indexing far more contemporary journals while Web of Science remains more selective and historically skewed.

That unevenness matters because bibliometric indicators are rarely used as neutral descriptions. When hiring committees, funding agencies, and national assessment exercises rely on them, the databases’ blind spots translate directly into institutional blind spots. Asubiaro, Onaolapo, and Mills documented regional disparities in Web of Science and Scopus coverage, showing that journals from the Global South are systematically underrepresented. Heleta and Mzileni’s analysis of South Africa’s accredited-journal indexes extends the argument, describing what they call bibliometric coloniality: the way citation infrastructures rooted in the Global North determine which knowledge is counted as legitimate science, and which is rendered invisible. Marginson and Xu’s work on hegemony and inequality in global science similarly challenges the center-periphery model, arguing that the dominance of a small cluster of wealthy, English-language publishing centers produces structural inequalities that metrics quietly naturalize.

Kulczycki’s book, as the review presents it, provides the conceptual scaffolding for understanding how this came to pass. Rather than treating publication metrics as passive measurements, he frames evaluation as a game with rules, players, and strategies. Scholars are not simply measured; they learn to play. They select journals for indexing prestige rather than audience, calibrate reference lists, and time submissions to optimize citation windows. The consequence, on this account, is that metrics do not merely reflect scholarly communication—they restructure it. The technical literature on citation impact indicators, most comprehensively synthesized in Waltman’s review in the Journal of Informetrics, has long acknowledged the statistical limitations of raw citation counts: field-normalization problems, length-of-citation-window biases, and the sensitivity of indicators to database cleaning decisions. What Kulczycki adds is the insight that these are not peripheral technicalities but the very levers through which the measurement system reshapes the behavior it claims to observe.

Shore and Wright’s contribution, building on two decades of anthropological work, widens the lens from individual indicators to what they call audit culture. Their intellectual lineage runs through Michael Power’s 1997 study of “the audit society,” in which rituals of verification proliferate because organizations must demonstrate trustworthiness symbolically rather than simply possess it. Shore himself had argued as early as 2008 that audit practices in universities amount to a form of illiberal governance: academics are ostensibly autonomous professionals, yet they are steered through performance targets, workload models, and publication counts rather than through direct commands. The new book extends this analysis beyond the university, tracing how indicators and rankings now govern hospitals, development agencies, and states. The underlying mechanism is consistent across domains—once a number becomes a target, it stops being a neutral measure and becomes an instrument of control.

The review situates both books within the broader political economy of higher education reform. Performance-based funding schemes, in which government allocations to universities depend on measured outputs, have spread globally, and Dougherty and Natow’s analysis in Higher Education found that neoliberal theory captures this practice only imperfectly: real-world schemes are shaped by political compromise, historical legacies, and bureaucratic negotiation, not just market logic. Similarly, Lynch’s account of “control by numbers” documents how new managerialism uses rankings and metrics to centralize authority within universities, shifting power from academic collegial bodies to administrative layers that interpret the numbers. Beerkens traces the evolution of performance data in higher education governance toward a “big data” era in which granular, real-time dashboards promise—or threaten—to make steering continuous rather than episodic. Madsen’s work on governing by numbers in social democratic contexts shows that even welfare-state higher education systems, ostensibly resistant to marketization, have adopted quantitative governance practices.

The faculty experience of this regime is documented in empirical work such as Vican, Friedman, and Andreasen’s study of competing logics in higher education, which found that academics experience metrics, money, and managerialism as conflicting demands on their professional identities. The h-index debate, summarized for librarians by Barnes, has moved from statistical quibbles to existential questions: if a single number can determine tenure, researchers rationally invest in citation-maximizing strategies rather than in slower, riskier, or more socially embedded forms of inquiry. The result, critics argue, is a systematic narrowing of research agendas toward topics, methods, and publication venues that generate countable output quickly.

Reform efforts have not been absent. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, issued in 2013, explicitly called on institutions to stop using journal-based metrics—most famously the journal impact factor—as a surrogate for the quality of individual research. The Leiden Manifesto, published in Nature in 2015 by Hicks, Wouters, Waltman, de Rijcke, and Rafols, set out ten principles for responsible metrics, including that indicators should be robust to gaming, transparent, and kept in their place as instruments serving research assessment rather than defining it. Both documents acknowledge the technical realities: citation indicators are statistically meaningful at the level of fields and aggregated units, but their variance at the level of individual researchers is far too high to bear the evaluative weight placed on them. Yet the review’s framing suggests that declarations have struggled to dislodge the underlying audit culture, because the problem is not merely methodological but political—indicators persist because they serve the governance needs of states, funders, and university administrations.

What emerges from reading the two books together, as Ma’s review makes clear, is a two-level picture. At one level are the technical artifacts: databases with uneven coverage, indices with known statistical pathologies, rankings with opaque weighting schemes. At another level is the cultural formation that Shore and Wright call audit culture, which explains why those artifacts acquire such coercive force. Xu’s work on epistemic diversity adds a further caution: cross-cultural comparative research shows that the very ontology of knowledge differs across traditions, meaning that a global metric regime built on one tradition’s publication and citation norms inevitably marginalizes others. Cameron’s old quip about informal sociology and Hare’s work on central planning haunt the discussion from opposite directions—both reminding readers that centrally planned systems, whether socialist or metric-based, generate characteristic pathologies of target-chasing and information distortion.

The stakes of this scholarship extend well beyond academia. Universities train the professionals who staff medicine, engineering, law, and public administration; if the incentive structures inside universities reward countable publication over genuine inquiry, those distortions propagate outward. The review’s quiet conclusion is that neither book offers a simple escape route, and neither claims to. Kulczycki’s evaluation game cannot simply be abandoned, because some form of assessment is unavoidable in systems that allocate public money; Shore and Wright’s audit culture cannot simply be opted out of, because verification demands are written into funding law. The realistic ambition, on both accounts, is to design indicators that are harder to game, to keep them subordinate to expert judgment, to diversify the databases and languages through which scholarship is recognized, and to restore spaces of academic work that are not continuously rendered as numbers. That the debate now spans bibliometrics, anthropology, sociology, and higher education policy is itself evidence of how thoroughly the machinery of measurement has penetrated the modern academy—and why understanding its gears has become a scientific problem in its own right.