How to judge scientists’ strengths : Nature News & Comment

abernard102@gmail.com 2015-11-13

Summary:

"When the director of a research institute asked his Twitter followers for a practical way to dig out promising candidates from the hundreds of applications sitting on his desk, the community responded in spades. An abundance of ideas was produced by an involved online discussion about the measures that are used to evaluate the quality of researchers’ work, and how those affect everything from funding to career paths. Ewan Birney, co-director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, UK, admitted on Twitter that he was procrastinating over how to prepare a shortlist from the applications, which together listed around 2,500 research papers. (Because the process is ongoing, Birney would not say exactly what the researchers were applying for.) ... Birney was tasked with sifting proposals that cover a broad range of disciplines, from imaging to genomics. Many researchers judge papers on the basis of the journal in which they are published. But others, says Birney, frown on that practice because the journal’s impact factor — the average number of citations that an article in it receives — doesn’t always reflect the quality of each individual article ... Other academics suggested using metrics such as an article’s citation count or a researcher’s h-index, which measures an individual’s productivity and citation impact. Birney says that although he did use these tools to some extent, he was wary of the fact that practices vary across different fields in ways that could skew comparisons in a cross-disciplinary sample ..."

 

Link:

http://www.nature.com/news/how-to-judge-scientists-strengths-1.18769

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.jif oa.impact oa.citations oa.metrics

Date tagged:

11/13/2015, 07:14

Date published:

11/13/2015, 02:14