As the dean of the largest faculty of education and psychology in Hong Kong, I regularly interview applicants for assistant professor positions. One of my favourite questions is about the applicants’ academic goal or mission in life.

It’s a challenging question that is easier to ask than answer. However, the answer is important, and any budding academic worth their salt should be able to talk lucidly about what fires their scholarship. Sadly, though they have only just started out on their academic careers, most appear to have already forgotten why they wanted to become academics in the first place.

They say that they want to be one of the world’s most cited scientists. Their vision is to increase their Scopus or Google Scholar h-index. Their ambition is to publish in journals with high impact factors. They are more concerned about the by-products of success than anything of substance.

Occasionally, I am heartened when interviewees explain their drive to discover something new, develop fresh models of understanding, change public attitudes, shake conventional wisdom, pioneer cross-disciplinary work or make some sort of positive difference to the world. Yet answers that provide any real insight into what academics are trying to achieve morally or intellectually are rare. Their typical answers remind me of research about children in thrall to celebrity culture, who want to be famous for the sake of being famous rather than first trying to achieve something worthwhile.

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But numbers-obsessed career visions are not exclusive to junior academics. I have also observed it among associate professors applying to be full professors. The requirement at many universities around the world is for professorship candidates to submit a CV and write a personal statement, but such statements regularly fail to be personal in any real sense and look more like rehashes of bibliometric data profiles.

Again, candidates parade their field-weighted citation impact, Scopus h-index, career citation count, or the amount of competitive research funding that they have acquired. What is absent is any heart, any passion, any real sense of who they are and what fuels their ambition.

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Yet the fault lies as much with universities as individuals – and it is a particularly common fault in my part of the world.

A fixation with metrics, including the journal impact factor (JIF), is a feature of academic life in Hong Kong and mainland China – from where about two-thirds of academics working in Hong Kong’s public universities hail. In these highly performative academic environments, the JIF, for instance, is routinely used as an indicator of the quality of an academic paper. But this false assumption fails to take into account the gaming of the JIF by some journals – such as demanding that contributors cite an excessive number of the journal’s previously published papers – not to mention the variable quality of papers even within a specific journal.

A more balanced and less lazy way to evaluate the performance of academics is recommended by the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, or ), whose signatories pledge to eliminate the use of journal-based metrics in funding, appointment and promotion considerations and, instead, to assess research on its own merits. Those signatories include many leading Western universities, including Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, ETH Zurich, Melbourne and PSL University in Paris. By contrast none of the Hong Kong or mainland Chinese universities have signed the agreement apart from the University of Nottingham Ningbo, which is a branch campus of a British university. Indeed, support for Dora in East Asia more widely is rare – although the University of Tokyo is a signatory.

Metrics, including the JIF, remain proxy indicators rather than direct measures of quality. They need to be seen as only a small part of the way in which we rate academic work and not the be-all and end-all.

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The decision of the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences to stop updating its journal ranking list in March this year is a hopeful sign that China is moving away from an over-reliance on metrics, although it is likely to take some time to change the prevailing culture of academic evaluation. Academics in Hong Kong and mainland China should be allowed to get back in touch with their moral and intellectual purposes – as universities get back in touch with theirs.

Bruce Macfarlane is dean of the Faculty of Education and Human Development and chair professor of educational leadership at the Education University of Hong Kong.