Or maybe you can be smart but have no ideas in quantity and quality, thus you rig the systems in your favour to not be dethroned by those who can. But that would show by number of innovations per yearafter a systemic shakeup like a war.
It shows up easily at a macro level of you look at total "innovations" for a society (and have a good way to measure that -- currently still in an "I know it when I see it" stage). It won't usually show up in individual researchers. A few will absolutely be insanely productive with real innovations, but unless you're proposing only hiring that small cast of individuals then you're back to the problem of distinguishing good scientific ideas and methods which just didn't pan out from other forms of actual laziness and fraud given that in both cases you see no meaningful output from the researcher in question.
