[buitreVirtual]

It's not just the funding but the jobs themselves. Universities and even the funding bodies want to show shiny easy-to-digest numbers to their stakeholders to justify tuition and government funds. Which means these institutions in turn expect those numbers from their researchers, who then are happy to comply and build their paper mills and citation cartels, solving no real problems at best and producing fake data at worst.

[agumonkey]

I think this issue is universal to any human work group. It would be worth studying it to better understand these patterns.