[Is Industrial Statistics Out of Control?]: Comment

Is the university-industrial complex out of control?

The Future of Disease Control Priorities; Comment on “Disease Control Priorities Third Edition Is Published: A Theory of Change Is Needed for Translating Evidence to Health Policy”

The Disease Control Priorities (DCP) project has substantially influenced national and global health priorities since 1993. DCP’s basic framework involves identification of disease burdens based on premature deaths and disability and application of the most cost-effective interventions to the largest burdens, taking into account local feasibility. The future impact of DCP will need to take into...

Comment: Citation Statistics

We welcome this critique of simplistic one-dimensional measures of academic performance, in particular the naive use of impact factors and the h-index, and we can only extend sympathy to colleagues who are being judged using some of the techniques described in the paper. In particular we welcome the report’s emphasis on the need for careful modeling of citation data rather than relying on simpl...

Comment: Citation Statistics

We discuss the paper “Citation Statistics” by the Joint Committee on Quantitative Assessment of Research. In particular, we focus on a necessary feature of “good” measures for ranking scientific authors: that good measures must able to accurately distinguish between authors.

Comment: Citation Statistics

I remember a US colleague commenting, in the mid 1980s, on the predilection of deans and other university managers for assessing academic statisticians’ performance in terms of the numbers of papers they published. The managers, he said, “don’t have many skills, but they can count.” It’s not clear whether the management science of assessing research performance in universities has advanced grea...