http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/mortarboard/2007/11/british_academics_favourite_
bl.html
Airing this discussion on EducationGuardian.co.uk
Donald
=====================
Donald MacLeod
editor EducationGuardian.co.uk
and SocietyGuardian.co.uk
020 7239 9913
Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ECS.SOTON.AC.UK>
Sent by: American Scientist Open Access Forum
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Subject
"Bibliometric Distortion": The Babblarazzi Are At It Again...
Comment on: "Bibliometrics could distort research assessment"
Guardian Education, Friday 9 November 2007
http://education.guardian.co.uk/RAE/story/0,,2207678,00.html
Yes, any system (including democracy, health care, welfare, taxation,
market economics, justice, education and the Internet) can be abused.
But
abuses can be detected, exposed and punished, and this is especially
true in the case of scholarly/scientific research, where "peer
review"
does not stop with publication, but continues for as long as research
findings are read and used. And it's truer still if it is all online
and
openly accessible.
The researcher who thinks his research impact can be spuriously
enhanced
by producing many small, "salami-sliced" publications instead of
fewer
substantial ones will stand out against peers who publish fewer, more
substantial papers. Paper lengths and numbers are metrics too, hence
they too can be part of the metric equation. And if most or all peers
do
salami-slicing, then it becomes a scale factor that can be factored
out
(and the metric equation and its payoffs can be adjusted to
discourage it).
Citations inflated by self-citations or co-author group citations can
also be detected and weighted accordingly. Robotically inflated
download
metrics are also detectable, nameable and shameable. Plagiarism is
detectable too, when all full-text content is accessible online.
The important thing is to get all these publications as well as their
metrics out in the open for scrutiny by making them Open Access. Then
peer and public scrutiny -- plus the analytic power of the algorithms
and the Internet -- can collaborate to keep them honest.
Harnad, S. (2007) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research
Assessment Exercise. In Proceedings of 11th Annual Meeting of the
International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics 11(1),
pp.
27-33, Madrid, Spain. Torres-Salinas, D. and Moed, H. F., Eds.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13804/
Stevan Harnad
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.h
tml
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/
UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS:
If you have adopted or plan to adopt a policy of providing Open
Access
to your own research article output, please describe your policy at:
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html
OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY:
BOAI-1 ("Green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access
journal
http://romeo.eprints.org/
OR
BOAI-2 ("Gold"): Publish your article in an open-access journal
if/when
a suitable one exists.
http://www.doaj.org/
AND
in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your
article
in your own institutional repository.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
http://archives.eprints.org/
http://openaccess.eprints.org/
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Received on Fri Nov 09 2007 - 13:08:11 GMT