Skip to main content

Indicators of scientific excellence - where are they?

The discussion about reputation-metrics in science is dragging on. By now everybody knows the standard indicators (publications, impact-factor, citations,...), everybody uses them, everybody criticises them - and everybody ignores them if necessary. It has become a ritual to do metrics-bashing (while boasting about the own Hirsch-factor). Something has to happen. 
Now. 
(It won't.)
While researching new metrics can earn you a living, the output, quite frankly, can bore you to tears. The same folks that were unable to show how scientific excellence maps onto numbers, now open the floodgates. They  spread their concept of 'excellence by Excel' from research to knowledge-transfer to impact on society - expanding the food-chain to be tagged. 
Get real! 
What societal impact does a scientific result have? The discovery of superconductivity? Research on linguistics of micro-languages? Any result: societal impact? Good luck!

The science-community is feeling the grip of the bureaucrats while science-funding is following the mirage of 'efficiency'. It looks as if everybody is fooled into submission.You know the line: 'I believe it is crap but since everybody is doing it, so should we' - which is heard from scientists and bureaucrats alike. So they all play those 'boredgames'.
The science-bureaucrats are the ones who need some computable numbers to rank, judge, praise or dismiss science and scientists - because they so deeply mistrust the concept of science and the peer-review-system, it seems. How could they understand the predominant working principle of curiosity-driven self-exploitation that powers any real scientist?
Since many of them can't distinguish potatoes from horse-droppings, they need the science-landscape mapped to a score-sheet to create their impressive set of poo-charts - umm, pie-charts.

This age-old approach to reputation-metrics looks so impressingly objective. But it must not be mistaken: no matter what numbers they compile, the best ones are the fallout of a peer's opinion:
publications? - Referrees have seen the paper and commented on it
citations? - Scientists quote what they learned to be important and trustworthy
PhD-theses? - a number of scientists were involved over years

Reputation-metrics as we know them - the compilation of indicators - is nothing but the condensate of peer-review that scientists justifiably rely on and that bureaucrats are so scared of. 'Objectivity' is a sweet deception and honesty about that would be a good thing for a start.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Academics should be blogging? No.

"blogging is quite simply, one of the most important things that an academic should be doing right now" The London School of Economics and Political Science states in one of their, yes, Blogs . It is wrong. The arguments just seem so right: "faster communication of scientific results", "rapid interaction with colleagues" "responsibility to give back results to the public". All nice, all cuddly and warm, all good. But wrong. It might be true for scientoid babble. But this is not how science works.  Scientists usually follow scientific methods to obtain results. They devise, for example, experiments to measure a quantity while keeping the boundary-conditions in a defined range. They do discuss their aims, problems, techniques, preliminary results with colleagues - they talk about deviations and errors, successes and failures. But they don't do that wikipedia-style by asking anybody for an opinion . Scientific discussion needs a set
8 comments
Read more

How Does Knowledge Get Into Society? A fly-by-artist-in-residence and a Dialogue

The artist Sadie Weis was shadowing some of the scientists at Paul-Drude-Institut (a research-institute for nanomaterials) for eight weeks, observing the way they work, how scientists communicate with eachother, how they explain stuff to an outsider. The result of this dialogue is a light-installation and - maybe more important for the scientists involved - a reflection of the scientists  and of the artist on the languages they use.  T his project of an artist in a fly-by-residency will be wrapped up on Saturday, November 10th with a p resentation by the artist Sadie Weis and a panel discussion on differences and similarities in the way artists and scientists communicate with the outside world                  November 10, 2018 from 14-18                 Paul-Drude-Institut für Festkörperelektronik                  Hausvogteiplatz 5–7, Berlin-Mitte                Germany For  the Dialogue,  please register at   exhibition@pdi-berlin.de .   Der Dialog wird auf Deutsc
Post a Comment
Read more

Driven by rotten Dinosaurs

My son is 15 years old. He asked me what a FAX-machine was. He get's the strange concept of CDs because there is a rack full with them next to the bookshelf, which contains tons of paper bound together in colorful bundles, called 'books'. He still accepts that some screens don't react to you punching your fingers on them. He repeatedly asks why my 'car' (he speaks the quotation marks) is powered by 'rotten dinosaurs'. At the same time he writes an email to Elon Musks Neuralink asking for an apprenticeship and sets up discord-servers for don't-ask-me-what. And slowly I am learning that it is a very good thing to be detached from historic technology, as you don't try to preserve an outdated concept while aiming to innovate. The optimized light-bulb would be an a wee bit more efficient, tiny light-bulb. But not a LED. An optimized FAX would probably handle paper differently - it would not be a file-transfer-system. Hyper-modern CDs might have tenf
Post a Comment
Read more