The moral imagination in an era of "Gaming Academia": Implications of emerging reputational issues in scholarly activities for knowledge organization practices

Abstract

Many participants in higher education build academic reputations in conjunction with their research initiatives (and subsequent citations) along with their teaching efforts. An assortment of reputational considerations related to scholarly publication and teaching is emerging in part as a result of availability of various Internet search and analysis applications. Examinations of ghostwriting efforts, citation circles, and dubious authorship assignments (such as "gift" authorship) are becoming easier to conduct even for individuals outside of the institutions involved. Although questionable publication and teaching practices have been reported for a number of years, the ability to monitor what is going on in a wide assortment of academic contexts has just recently emerged with widely-available tools such as Google Scholar, ResearchGate, and Ratemyprofessors.com. Forms of plagiarism have also been made more readily detectable through various technological applications. This paper addresses ethical issues involved in these potentially-problematic scholarly practices. It also explores ethical dimensions of an assortment of transparency-related university, professional organization, and third-party initiatives that analyze academic activity. It frames the notion of the "moral imagination" in terms of specific efforts to "game" academics, initiatives undertaken possibly for personal reputational gain on the part of higher education participants or increases in institutional rankings.