It was reported on the Columbia Statistics Blog that Greg Mankiw links to an article on his blog by Peter Lawrence on the mismeasurement of science. Lawrence writes:
Modern science, particularly biomedicine, is being damaged by attempts to measure the quantity and quality of research. Scientists are ranked according to these measures, a ranking that impacts on funding of grants, competition for posts and promotion. The measures seemed, at first rather harmless, but, like cuckoos in a nest, they have grown into monsters that threaten science itself. . . .
The journals are evaluated according to impact factors, and scientists and departments assessed according to the impact factors of the journals they publish in. Consequently, over the last twenty years a scientist's primary aim has been downgraded from doing science to producing papers and contriving to get them into the "best" journals they can. Now there is a new trend: the idea is to rank scientists by the numbers of citations their papers receive. Consequently, I predict that citation-fishing and citation-bartering will become major pursuits. . . .
2 comments:
this has particular relevance for economics in a university context. even the very best economics journals have lower impact factors than decent journals in natural sciences and certainly get cited less. A brief research report co-authored (with authorship quite liberally defined in some cases) could get you 100 citations in a journal with an impact factor of greater than 10. getting in to aer or econometrica or something like that could take years and has lower impact. economists view them (rightly) as the best outputs for economists but university administrators (particularly if they are not economists) are under no compulsion to agree
Economists, of all people,should be aware of the problems of inference with bad data & the incentive problems that these measures generate. However they seem to be just as gung-ho about their use as the scientists: quantification at all costs. Even Irish economists are not immune from producing such rubbish alas.
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