Scholars Seek Better Metrics for Assessing Research Productivity

"[I]f researchers are going to be rewarded because 50,000 people read one of their scholarly articles, should the evaluators worry about how many of those readers seem to be scientists? [Michael J. Kurtz, an astronomer at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics] did not offer an opinion, but said that question would need to be debated as open-access databases take root...."