We are funding science backwards.
We make people pay to have access to databases to read research papers and then allow them to cite applicable papers for free.
It should be the opposite. Reading the papers should be free, and researchers should have to pay a license to cite the papers of others.
Consider an alternative research economy where researchers have to pay to cite prior work. That would better incentivise reseachers to focus their studies on works that are most likely to be cited by others (ie. they would be incentivised to produce more impactful research). The researchers that produce highly cited papers would become their own revenue stream to self-fund more of their own work.
Einstein would have died a very very rich man.
That would allow highly successful reseachers to be much less reliant on outside grant sources, and show those grant sources to spread their resources to more new researchers.
First off, that would incentivize researchers to reduce their citations, making it harder for everyone to find relevant related work.
Secondly, it would be trivial to circumvent: just cite review articles from other countries outside this payment system, that reference the works you actually want to cite.
Under my system, a reseacher would be incentivised to sue the publisher claiming their research should have been cited. If anything it would create “research trolls”.
However, a researcher could purchase professional insurance that would handle those claims.
And just like that, you’ve invented a new business idea.
Your idea just gets dumber and dumber.