ترغب بنشر مسار تعليمي؟ اضغط هنا

A scientists view of scientometrics: Not everything that counts can be counted

145   0   0.0 ( 0 )
 نشر من قبل Olesya Mryglod
 تاريخ النشر 2017
والبحث باللغة English




اسأل ChatGPT حول البحث

Like it or not, attempts to evaluate and monitor the quality of academic research have become increasingly prevalent worldwide. Performance reviews range from at the level of individuals, through research groups and departments, to entire universities. Many of these are informed by, or functions of, simple scientometric indicators and the results of such exercises impact onto careers, funding and prestige. However, there is sometimes a failure to appreciate that scientometrics are, at best, very blunt instruments and their incorrect usage can be misleading. Rather than accepting the rise and fall of individuals and institutions on the basis of such imprecise measures, calls have been made for indicators be regularly scrutinised and for improvements to the evidence base in this area. It is thus incumbent upon the scientific community, especially the physics, complexity-science and scientometrics communities, to scrutinise metric indicators. Here, we review recent attempts to do this and show that some metrics in widespread use cannot be used as reliable indicators research quality.

قيم البحث

اقرأ أيضاً

Do scientists follow hot topics in their scientific investigations? In this paper, by performing analysis to papers published in the American Physical Society (APS) Physical Review journals, it is found that papers are more likely to be attracted by hot fields, where the hotness of a field is measured by the number of papers belonging to the field. This indicates that scientists generally do follow hot topics. However, there are qualitative differences among scientists from various countries, among research works regarding different number of authors, different number of affiliations and different number of references. These observations could be valuable for policy makers when deciding research funding and also for individual researchers when searching for scientific projects.
We stress-test the career predictability model proposed by Acuna et al. [Nature 489, 201-202 2012] by applying their model to a longitudinal career data set of 100 Assistant professors in physics, two from each of the top 50 physics departments in th e US. The Acuna model claims to predict h(t+Delta t), a scientists h-index Delta t years into the future, using a linear combination of 5 cumulative career measures taken at career age t. Here we investigate how the predictability depends on the aggregation of career data across multiple age cohorts. We confirm that the Acuna model does a respectable job of predicting h(t+Delta t) up to roughly 6 years into the future when aggregating all age cohorts together. However, when calculated using subsets of specific age cohorts (e.g. using data for only t=3), we find that the models predictive power significantly decreases, especially when applied to early career years. For young careers, the model does a much worse job of predicting future impact, and hence, exposes a serious limitation. The limitation is particularly concerning as early career decisions make up a significant portion, if not the majority, of cases where quantitative approaches are likely to be applied.
For which graphs $F$ is there a sparse $F$-counting lemma in $C_4$-free graphs? We are interested in identifying graphs $F$ with the property that, roughly speaking, if $G$ is an $n$-vertex $C_4$-free graph with on the order of $n^{3/2}$ edges, then the density of $F$ in $G$, after a suitable normalization, is approximately at least the density of $F$ in an $epsilon$-regular approximation of $G$. In recent work, motivated by applications in extremal and additive combinatorics, we showed that $C_5$ has this property. Here we construct a family of graphs with the property.
In this work, we extend our previous work on largeness tracing among physicists to other fields, namely mathematics, economics and biomedical science. Overall, the results confirm our previous discovery, indicating that scientists in all these fields trace large topics. Surprisingly, however, it seems that researchers in mathematics tend to be more likely to trace large topics than those in the other fields. We also find that on average, papers in top journals are less largeness-driven. We compare researchers from the USA, Germany, Japan and China and find that Chinese researchers exhibit consistently larger exponents, indicating that in all these fields, Chinese researchers trace large topics more strongly than others. Further correlation analyses between the degree of largeness tracing and the numbers of authors, affiliations and references per paper reveal positive correlations -- papers with more authors, affiliations or references are likely to be more largeness-driven, with several interesting and noteworthy exceptions: in economics, papers with more references are not necessary more largeness-driven, and the same is true for papers with more authors in biomedical science. We believe that these empirical discoveries may be valuable to science policy-makers.
We review some aspects, especially those we can tackle analytically, of a minimal model of closed economy analogous to the kinetic theory model of ideal gases where the agents exchange wealth amongst themselves such that the total wealth is conserved , and each individual agent saves a fraction (0 < lambda < 1) of wealth before transaction. We are interested in the special case where the fraction lambda is constant for all the agents (global saving propensity) in the closed system. We show by moment calculations that the resulting wealth distribution cannot be the Gamma distribution that was conjectured in Phys. Rev. E 70, 016104 (2004). We also derive a form for the distribution at low wealth, which is a new result.
التعليقات
جاري جلب التعليقات جاري جلب التعليقات
سجل دخول لتتمكن من متابعة معايير البحث التي قمت باختيارها
mircosoft-partner

هل ترغب بارسال اشعارات عن اخر التحديثات في شمرا-اكاديميا