New Delhi, May 4 -- When a graduate student today sets out to research inflation dynamics or quantum materials, she does not head to a library database. She opens ChatGPT or Perplexity, types her query and receives a synthesized answer with the citations.

She may never open a single academic paper. The research shaping her thinking has been filtered, ranked and distilled by an artificial intelligence (AI) system. This is demolishing the foundations of academic evaluation as we know it.

For decades, the proxies of research impact were clicks, downloads, page views and citations recorded in Scopus or Web of Science. Universities aggregated these to assess productivity. Funding bodies used them to allocate grants. The logic: more clicks me...