[LIS-Forum] "Academics strike back at spurious rankings" (Nature, 31 May)

Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2007 01:22:46 -0700 (PDT) From: Subbiah Arunachalam Friends: All those who are using citation data for evaluating/ comparing different institutions may find this posting by Stevan Harnad useful. If a vast majority of researchers self-archive their papers in their institutional archives, then OA scientometrics can provide a far more reliable evaluation. Best wishes. Subbiah Arunachalam --- Stevan Harnad wrote:

Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2007 01:49:19 +0100 From: Stevan Harnad Subject: "Academics strike back at spurious rankings" (Nature, 31 May) To: JISC-REPOSITORIES@JISCMAIL.AC.UK

Academics strike back at spurious rankings D Butler, Nature 447, 514-515 (31 May 2007) doi:10.1038/447514b

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v447/n7144/full/447514b.html

This news item in Nature lists some of the (very valid) objections to the many unvalidated university rankings -- both subjective and objective -- that are in wide use today.

These problems are all the more reason for extending Open Access (OA) and developing OA scientometrics, which will provide open, validatable and calibratable metrics for research, researchers, and institutions in each field -- a far richer, more sensitive, and more equitable spectrum of metrics than the few, weak and unvalidated measures available today.

Some research groups that are doing relevant work on this are, in the UK: (1) our own OA scientometrics group at Southampton (and UQaM, Canada), and our collaborators Charles Oppenheim (Loughborough) and Arthur Sale (Tasmania); (2) Mike Thelwall (Wolverhampton); in the US: (3) Johan Bollen & Herbert van de Sompel at LANL; and in the Netherlands: (5) Henk Moed & Anton van Raan (Leiden; cited in the Nature news item).

Universities seek reform of ratings by Declan Butler For details, visit: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v447/n7144/full/447514b.html