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| Mr.B1ack... |
 Posted: Thu Nov 05, 2009 4:12 pm |
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President Medvedev wants scientists to be rated by citation index
http://www.itar-tass.com/eng/level2.html?NewsID=14502055
MOSCOW, November 5 (Itar-Tass) -- Russian President Dmitry Medvedev
believes that the education ministry must do its utmost to introduce
the world practice of rating scientists\u2019 efficiency by the
citation index.
At a meeting with members of the council of the upper house of
parliament Medvedev said that "as far as the citation index as
the main yardstick to gauge the merits of a scientist is concerned, it
is the sole one that is used the world over and I agree 200 percent we
should use it to the maximum extent, with certain reservations,
though."
He explained that in relation to sciences the citation index works
with 100-percent certainty, but when it came to humanities, it was all
very different.
"Humanities bear the ethnic flavor of this or that country to a far
greater extent. lf some of our philologists, political scientists or
lawyers are not quoted very often in the West, that does not mean
anything" Medvedev said.
"On the whole, this method of rating achievements in sciences is an
absolutely correct one, and our Ministry of Education has already
looked into the possibility of using the citation index as such a
parameter", he said.
- - - - -
Uh oh .... it looks as if Russia is about to make the same
mistakes the west has been making - rating a scientists
worth by citation index and/or the sheer volume of
publications.
Rating scientists by volume has created what's commonly
called the "publish or perish" environment. The result
has been a stream of incomplete/premature results and
the odious practice of breaking papers down into small
disconnected component units so each can be published
independently.
The 'citation index' has been touted as an improvement over
sheer numbers of publications. However it has serious downsides
of its own. Some fields/sub-fields, no matter how important,
are just less popular than others - meaning fewer citations
and thus penalizing those scientists.
Other fields are only accessible to those who breath the
rare air of extreme intelligence - the cutting edges of
quantum mechanics, astrophysics, information theory or
pure mathematics. Again, with few peers, their citation
index will be low.
But worst of all, using the CI penalizes those at the
frontier of truely NEW fields or lines of research -
things for which there really ARE no peers yet, things
for which uses have yet to be discovered, things that
upset convention and are deliberately shunned. In
this situation, CI actually inhibits innovation and
the development of new ideas.
Theoretically, someones CI can be "adjusted" to reflect
how many peers exist in a given field/sub-field. Alas,
the correction factor is a judgement call, a guess
about what a new field really *is* and thus how many
peers that scientist may actually have. With the
proliferation of sub-disciplines, sub-sub-disciplines
and so forth, the chances of true innovators getting
screwed is substantial.
Science has become *so* specialized these days that
those making the judgement calls may know little or
nothing about the line of research under discussion -
rather like bureaucrats who make 'scientific' policy
when they know nothing about the subjects at hand.
We all know how well *that* tends to turn out ....
CI seems to favor those who work in "popular" fields
and who do research that will quickly be translated
into sellable technology - even if it's anything but
groundbreaking, earth-shattering or paradigm-busting.
As for Russia ... I suspect Medvedevs great new idea
will simply increase the rate of "brain drain" as
good, but under-cited, scientists flee to more
enlightened nations. |
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