Friday 8 February 2013

Why Journal Ranking is Bad

The following article has been published on arXiv:


At the end of the analysis, the authors state that:
"It is conceivable that, for the last few decades, research institutions world-wide may have been hiring and promoting scientists who excel at marketing their work to top journals, but who are not necessarily equally good at conducting their research. Conversely, these institutions may have purged excellent scientists from their ranks, whose marketing skills did not meet institutional requirements. If this interpretation of the data is correct, we now have a generation of excellent marketers (possibly, but not necessarily also excellent scientists) as the leading figures of the scientific enterprise, constituting another potentially major contributing factor to the rise in retractions. This generation is now in charge of training the next generation of scientists, with all the foreseeable consequences for the reliability of scientific publications in the future."
This is as clear as water for any serious person in academia, but is also convenient for many people. As the authors wrote, each new generation of scientist is being raised under the tenet that being a marketeer is as important as, or even more, than being a good scientist. The worst thing is that they indeed start to believe in that!

This correlates strongly with all that has been said about academic publishers. If you read the article, you will notice very fast that Thomas Reuters, the company which "calculates" the index that ranks the journals, must be earning a lot of money with that. At some point of the last century, companies noticed that the academics were an easy prey. We seemed to accept that in silence and, instead of generating money for ourselves and our research, we are very happy in working for free to generate money for the industry...

I suggest a thorough reading of this paper... and that, if you are a supervisor, think about teaching not only the right thing to your student, but also show him very clearly what is wrong.


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