Larry Richardson’s online profile suggested that he was a young mathematician with significant potential.
According to Google Scholar — a website widely used to evaluate academics for jobs and promotions — he had produced a dozen research papers in the past four years, which had been cited by his peers scores of times. His career appeared to be blossoming.
There was just one issue: Larry was a cat.
In fact, he was the most highly cited feline in the world of academia — thanks to an experiment designed to expose long-standing flaws in how researchers are ranked.
The story began when Reese Richardson, a PhD candidate at Northwestern University in the US, and Nick Wise, a research associate at the University of Cambridge, spotted services