Academic sell-out: how an obsession with metrics and rankings is damaging academia

By Thorsten Gruber. 2014

110 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Increasingly, academics have to demonstrate that their research has academic impact. Universities normally use journal rankings and journal impact factors to assess the research impact of individual academics. More recently, citation counts for individual articles and the h-index have also been used to measure the academic impact of academics. There are, however, several serious problems with relying on journal rankings, journal impact factors and citation counts. For example, articles without any impact may be published in highly ranked journals or journals with high impact factor, whereas articles with high impact could be published in lower ranked journals or journals with low impact factor. Citation counts can also be easily gamed and manipulated, and the h-index disadvantages early career academics. This paper discusses these and several other problems and suggests alternatives such as post-publication peer review and open-access journals.

Subfields: Information Systems, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/81d8e61be94e8aee71cba42bfb07efa5b7968fe1

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Citations in the corpus

Understanding psychology's resistance to intersectionality theory using a framework of epistemic exclusion and invisibility (2020, unknown): “Evaluation metrics, such as journal impact factors and grant funding (Hoppe et al., 2019; Roberts, Bareket-Shavit, Dollins, Goldie, & Mortenson, 2020), codified these assumptions and subsequently contributed to evaluation inequities (e.g., Gruber, 2014; Settles, Jones, Buchanan, & Dotson, 2020a).”
Scrutinized but not recognized: (In)visibility and hypervisibility experiences of faculty of color (2019, background): “…for Asians reporting epistemic exclusion, 88% were born outside the U.S. Formally, evaluations of scholarship were filtered through seemingly “objective” assessment metrics (e.g., number of publications, journal impact factors, and the amount and source of extramural grant funding; Gruber, 2014).”
Scholarly use of social media and altmetrics: A review of the literature (2016, background): “, “Alternative Metrics,” 2012; Wouters & Costas, 2012), whereas others have argued that altmetrics are not impact indicators, but rather indicators of attention and popularity (Crotty, 2014; Gruber, 2014; Sugimoto, 2015).”
Is Peer Review a Good Idea? (2020, background): “1; Jukola [2017]; Katzav and Vaesen [2017]; Heesen [2018a]).”