​​The book begins from a central problem in the contemporary research environment and academic publishing policies: the necessity of evaluating researchers and scientific institutions, and the growing demand for indicators assumed to be objective. However, these indicators reduce scholarly value to the number of citations, turning the researcher into a mere “number” in bibliometric tables, that is, the statistical measurement of citations. The book shows that these tools do not truly fulfill the purpose for which they were adopted, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, where scientific value is reduced to quantitative indicators that may mislead judgments and encourage distorted publishing practices.​