In that moment, I was not just defending the work. I was conceding to a logic I was not fully comfortable with. The demand for a metric had begun to displace the conceptual work itself. I had internalised the pressure to quantify. I had started with the hope of clarifying a concept, but I ended up simplifying it. It was not that I resorted to metrics because the ideas were empty or vague; they were theoretically substantive, but that was no longer enough.

The pressure to quantify research is erasing conceptual depth – LSE Blogs