An Index for Flourishing
A Postcard from 2055
It is 2055. Professor Nova Cypher stands at her desk gazing at her annual Collective Flourishing Review, a metahologram representing her contributions to the collective flourishing of staff and students. It shimmers in incandescent light above her desk at Monash University’s Kepler-452b campus. The metrics pulse gently: Collaboration Quotient 89%, Knowledge Accessibility 92%, Mentorship 95%, Social Impact 90%. One metric, however, creates a pang of disappointment- the Cross-Universal Citation Balance has dipped to 76% since last year.
Her watch flashes orange before Kai appears. “I detect changes in your heart rate, galvanic skin response, and breathing patterns. Cortisol levels indicate anxiety. Is everything alright?”
“I am disappointed in the Cross-Universal Citation Balance. And I am thinking about my grandfather’s stories about planet Earth,” she says. “I remember he had a lot to say about arbitrary academic performance metrics. Are they really even needed anymore?”
Nova swipes her right hand in the air, opening a memory portal. She appears as a little girl, looking up at her grandfather hunched over his desk, his brow furrowed and his face stressed and exhausted. Staring at an ancient boxy device of the kind she had once seen marked for sale in an antique store as a “backlit flat screen”, he seemed engrossed with a website called “Google Scholar”. It was displaying his “h-index”, an arcane concept based on academic citations. Nova knew these to be archaic metrics that journals used to enhance their prestige. Authors once boasted about these metrics, and universities measured the success of their research staff using them, even deploying similar figures in marketing campaigns to attract students.
These were arbitrary measures that favoured a certain type of academic, rewarding time served over impact and supporting the profit pursuit of publishers. They existed in a time before someone asked the simple question: if science rewards what it measures, what would happen if we measured what scientists actually valued? The 2028 Academic Uprising followed. Academics boycotted article processing charges, abandoned citation-based metrics, and redirected their energy toward visible, practitioner-focused, and publicly accessible outlets. Peer review without incentives was largely abandoned. Universities were transformed into environments that prioritised student experience and learning outcomes over publication counts. After many decades of debate and resentment, the 2020s saw academics finally applying their critical knowledge, thinking innovatively, and taking a stand for what they valued. The focus on citations had withered to nothing by the start of the 2030s.
“Would you like to access your grandfather’s record?” Kai asks.
“Yes, please.”
Grandad’s statistics were impressive: a total research output of 847 publications and 25,000 citations across his lengthy career. But the statistical overlay of that time also revealed high rates of burnout, depression, and inequality.
Nova cringes. “It is so hard to believe they measured success by how many papers could be published or how often they were cited. Thank goodness for the academic reforms that changed everything. Scientists who had spent decades measuring wellbeing for everyone else finally looked inward to benefit their own workplaces. It is hard to believe that some still argue the old metrics had merit.”
Nova walks to the window overlooking the university’s collaborative Knowledge Garden, where elders teach traditional ecological knowledge alongside quantum physics professors. “Grandfather said he published 30 papers in his first year as a professor; all in English, all in top-tier US journals. But he barely talked to anyone outside his discipline.” He was well recognised by people he had never met in places he had never visited, yet almost entirely unknown by the people who might have used his work had it not been locked behind a paywall.
Nova asks Kai if there was merit in the old system.
Kai replies with a question: “How many publications did you have this year?”
“Three,” Nova smiles. “One on Earth’s Indonesia with researchers from rural communities about traditional Indigenous medicine practices, one mixed-media piece with my students about AI applications in mental health, and a collaboration with astrophysicists and belonging researchers on terraforming principles on campuses across the worlds. All outputs were open access, all with research translation and public engagement components.”
Pulsing above her desk, the metahologram displays her social impact web. It shows threads spread around the universe, colours denoting ripples of knowledge transfer, cross-cultural collaboration, and societal transformation. Kai then overlays Nova’s grandfather’s impact web. “Your work reaches far more people in a week than your grandfather’s did in a year.”
Nova swipes towards her flourishing report and zooms in on her latest project, a virtual reality educational module developed with former students for newcomers to remote communities on Earth. The metrics show unprecedented engagement across 17 settled worlds. “Are we too focused on these new metrics?” she asks Kai. “Trading one set of numbers for another?”
“It is just…” she pauses. “Last week, I delayed submitting a grant proposal for a mentorship program for first-generation university students. Under the old system, that would have impacted my metrics but under our current system, it actually boosted my wellbeing metrics. Of course, the old system made us compete for funding, and the new system rewards impactful ideas. But both systems try to quantify us. Are they really so different?”
Kai displays a universal map of academic flourishing indicators. “Perhaps the difference lies not in the measurement itself but in what we choose to measure. Your grandfather’s system measured individual achievement. Our current system measures collective flourishing.”
Nova’s wrist device makes a subtle vibration, alerting her that a student is seeking support. Her Mentorship metric rises slightly.
“The numbers are still just proxies,” Nova says to herself, preparing to answer the call. “But at least now they are proxies for the things that actually matter. Things that academics actually value.”
Nova chats with her student as her Global Knowledge Enhancement through Compassionate Practice score rises to 98%. She wonders what metrics the next generation will choose to measure, but always hopes that academics will continue prioritising things they actually value. Because what we measure, we actually strive for.
Citation counts, aggregated into h-indices and impact factors, have been slowly distorting university rankings, promotion criteria, funding decisions, and academic behaviour for seven decades. What they measure is narrower than most people admit: attention within a geographically concentrated, historically homogeneous network structured to reward those who are already well cited. The journals defining prestige cluster in the United Kingdom and the United States. There are 195 countries in the world. What of the researchers in Lagos, Lahore, and Lima? Does their work not matter? No metric in modern science has been more discriminatory in its effects, and none has been more invisible about it.
Publishing well-cited papers in high-impact journals drives career progression, which generates intense pressure to perform, all the while many academics are turning their back on peer review, creating publishing delays and ultimately punishing real world application of findings that could actually benefit people. The conditions this creates are well documented: competition, isolation, marginalisation of voices, and burnout. But ultimately, no measure is fully capturing what academics actually value like mentorship, genuine collaboration across disciplines and communities, work that reaches people who may benefit, and a collegial culture where early-career researchers are supported. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment identified this in 2012. Nearly 25,000 scientists and organisations signed it, yet the h-index remains the dominant measure of academic worth.
What if we measured what academics value instead of publication and citation counts? Imagine a workplace where promotion decisions were based on research reach and impact, collaboration, knowledge equity, and contribution to scientific infrastructure including peer review and mentorship. Many of these measures already exist in fragmented forms across different data repositories, and now AI-assisted impact tracking has made aggregating them more affordable at scale for the first time. Someone may ask whether this system can be gamed like the current one. It can. But game it and you only produce more mentorship, more collaboration, more open access publishing, more careful peer review, and maybe more collective flourishing. Would those things necessarily be a bad thing?