Comment: Citation Statistics
نویسنده
چکیده
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 greatly in the intervening quarter century, but there are certainly more things to count than ever before, and there are increasingly sophisticated ways of doing the counting. The paper by Adler, Ewing and Taylor is rightly critical of many of the practices, and arguments, that are based on counting citations. The authors are to be congratulated for producing a forthright and informative document, which is already being read by scientists in fields outside the mathematical sciences. For example, I mentioned the paper at a meeting of the executive of an Australian science body, and found that its very existence generated considerable interest. Even in fields where impact factors, h-factors and their brethren are more widely accepted than in mathematics or statistics, there is apprehension that the use of those numbers is getting out of hand, and that their implications are poorly understood. The latter point should be of particular concern. We know, sometimes from bitter experience, of some of the statistical challenges of comparing journals or scientists on the basis of citation data—for example, the data can be very heavy-tailed, and there
منابع مشابه
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.
متن کاملComment: 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...
متن کاملMachine Learning with Selective Word Statistics for Automated Classification of Citation Subjectivity in Online Biomedical Articles
There is growing interest in automatically classifying author’s sentiment expressed within citation sentences in scientific literature to provide effective tools for researchers who are seeking relevant previous work or approaches for a certain research purpose. We propose an automated method of determining whether a given citation sentence contains an author’s subjective opinion (positive or n...
متن کاملRejoinder: Citation Statistics
We would like to thank the discussants for reading our report and for their insightful and constructive comments. To start our brief response, we would like to quote Bernard Silverman’s phrase “reducing an assessment of an individual to a single number is both morally and professionally repugnant.” Bernard puts it strongly, but his underlying point, with which we strongly agree, is that “resear...
متن کاملConceptual difficulties in the use of statistical inference in citation analysis
In this comment, I discuss the use of statistical inference in citation analysis. In a recent paper, Williams and Bornmann argue in favor of the use of statistical inference in citation analysis. I present a critical analysis of their arguments and of similar arguments provided elsewhere in the literature. My conclusion is that the use of statistical inference in citation analysis involves majo...
متن کاملCitation Statistics
This is a report about the use and misuse of citation data in the assessment of scientific research. The idea that research assessment must be done using “simple and objective” methods is increasingly prevalent today. The “simple and objective” methods are broadly interpreted as bibliometrics, that is, citation data and the statistics derived from them. There is a belief that citation statistic...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید
ثبت ناماگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید
ورودعنوان ژورنال:
- CoRR
دوره abs/0910.3546 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2009