Community engagement has played central roles in tertiary education, expanding the potentials for academic as well as civic enhancement. Such efforts are often undertaken in part with the use of metrics, as tertiary education institutions attempt to reach various community audiences with quantitatively-supported defenses of their missions, through research analyses and publications, and with their participation in formal institutional ranking systems. However, dramatic expansions of the use of metrics and the importance of publications in academics have fostered gaming and manipulation practices designed to enhance artificially both individual and institutional reputations, including predatory journal administration, coercive citation, forced joint authorship, paper mill and ghostwriting efforts, H-index manipulation, creation of bogus documents, development of fraudulent academic conferences, and many others, as well as falsified research itself. As they emerge in the press or in watchdog reports, such questionable practices can disturb delicate negotiations concerning the respective roles of communities and academic institutions as well as be perceived by some community members as violations of trust. The practices can be especially harmful when associated with celebrity or “star” academics who often are granted substantial institutional leeway. This study maps an assortment of these emerging practices from a community engagement perspective; it also analyzes recent discourse as to the impacts the normalizations of these problematic practices are having on community-academic interactions. It discusses strategies toward making production and use of academic metrics and related research output less easily manipulated and more worthy of trust both by academic participants and the community as a whole.

中文翻译：

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高等教育机构的学术指标和社区参与：游戏、操纵和信任中的新问题

社区参与在高等教育中发挥了核心作用，扩大了学术和公民提升的潜力。由于高等教育机构试图通过研究分析和出版物以及他们参与正式的机构排名系统，以数量支持的方式捍卫其使命，从而部分地使用指标来进行此类努力。然而，指标使用的急剧扩展和学术出版物的重要性促进了旨在人为提高个人和机构声誉的博弈和操纵实践，包括掠夺性期刊管理、强制引用、强制联合作者、造纸厂和代笔工作， H-index 操作，伪造文件的创建，欺诈性学术会议的发展，以及许多其他，以及伪造的研究本身。当它们出现在媒体或监管机构的报告中时，这种有问题的做法会扰乱关于社区和学术机构各自角色的微妙谈判，并被一些社区成员视为违反信任。当与名人或“明星”学者联系在一起时，这些做法可能特别有害，他们通常被授予大量的机构回旋余地。本研究从社区参与的角度描绘了这些新兴实践的分类；它还分析了最近关于这些有问题的做法的正常化对社区-学术互动的影响的讨论。