From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.science.mathematics.categories/4746 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Vaughan Pratt Newsgroups: gmane.science.mathematics.categories Subject: Re: Science Citation Index Date: Tue, 09 Dec 2008 11:35:16 -0800 Message-ID: Reply-To: Vaughan Pratt NNTP-Posting-Host: main.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1241020146 14668 80.91.229.2 (29 Apr 2009 15:49:06 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:49:06 +0000 (UTC) To: categories@mta.ca Original-X-From: rrosebru@mta.ca Wed Dec 10 07:09:03 2008 -0400 Return-path: Envelope-to: categories-list@mta.ca Delivery-date: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 07:09:03 -0400 Original-Received: from Majordom by mailserv.mta.ca with local (Exim 4.61) (envelope-from ) id 1LAMrh-0000Or-D2 for categories-list@mta.ca; Wed, 10 Dec 2008 07:04:25 -0400 Original-Sender: categories@mta.ca Precedence: bulk X-Keywords: X-UID: 52 Original-Lines: 98 Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.science.mathematics.categories:4746 Archived-At: The thing I don't understand about citation indexes is, what is the barrier to entry here? For any field naturally associated to a university department (physics, mathematics, chemistry, history, English), what is to stop that field deciding that in the interest of fairness to all professionals working in the field whose work is subject to review, for example junior faculty, it is going to run its own citation index subscribing to a set of technical and ethical standards that it makes public and holds itself to, e.g. via ISO 9000 certification? It then actively works to promote the use of its index by reviewing bodies, in competition with the existing citation indexes run for profit. Usually reviewers in any given field are reluctant to confess to depending on citation indexes as a labor saving device. However when a field has acknowledged the efficiency of doing so and has set up an adequately run index serving that need, and a review states that the only citation index if any resorted to by the reviewer was the field's own, the credibility of that review is enhanced even though the reviewer has not stated whether he or she actually used that index. Reviewers should not be asked to reveal actual use of an index because that information could prejudice users of the review against reviewees whose reviewers felt the need to resort to an index, since that could be taken as a sign of non-notability, of questionable relevance to a reviewee's performance. Obviously one wants to hire and retain the most famous people, but they've all gone to the highest bidder. More significantly, fields lose credibility in the eyes of other fields when they put notability ahead of competence. Most of all, they lose effectiveness when they do not give due credit to researchers whose low profile keeps them below the radar of reviewers yet who are nonetheless valuable players. MVP can mean either most valuable player or most visible player, and these need not always be the same thing in subjects that don't have 80,000 readers of each and every scientific article. Because the field's index is working for the benefit of the field more than for its own profit, it can and should maintain two-way contact with those working in the field, by encouraging them to contribute suitably formatted information listing and classifying their identifiable contributions, as an extension of their CV. In this way CV's need no longer be isolated documents but instead become coordinated with the field's index, whose maintenance becomes the joint responsibility of the researcher and the index. This divides the labor that hitherto has had to be duplicated to a considerable degree at both ends, potentially halving the cost of this part of the review process. Done properly, these field indexes will consume resources of course, but these can be underwritten in the same way that the for-profit indexes make their money, namely by charging for them at rates competitive with the established indexes, but with the additional edge of being supplemented by subsidies from the homes of the appointment and promotion committees whose work will in consequence be of a higher quality than it presently is today and who therefore can reasonably make that case to their provost or HR department. Many fields already maintain their own indexes, which should in principle be relatively easy to upgrade to the standards suggested here compared to having to start from scratch, to the extent that the field is adequately coordinated with the indexes it considers itself to be operating. An index purportedly serving a field that is not responsive to the field's membership should be disowned by the field and an index competing with it set up. Such a threat should motivate any field's existing indexes that can see which side their bread is buttered on to play ball. There is the tricky question of what to do with multiple established indexes operated independently but at least nominally under a field's control. One approach is to select one of them as the one responsible for the functions proposed here, but if they are complementary then some sort of coordination between them producing an effect sufficient for those purposes may be a better solution, as being less disruptive to their complementarity, whose benefits should be clear to all duality theorists. Once a field's index has been accepted by an institution, and becomes the primary if not only reference for all who need to consult such indexes, the institution's library need feel under no obligation to maintain their subscriptions to competing indexes serving that field. The above-mentioned institutional subsidies can then be drawn at least in part from those savings, an added efficiency of this system. Indexes run according to these principles should strongly incentivize all who stand to benefit from their quality to contribute to that quality according to their roles. The extant indexes can complain all they want about uncompetitive practices, but at bottom they are the ones who brought this unwanted competition on themselves by operating an inferior product. Pragmatic governments do not legislate in competition with Darwin's law of survival of the fittest because in economics that law trumps all others. Governments that legislate at odds with Darwin's law fall victim to it, as we saw with Russia. Western civilization has not intentionally legislated against the interests of fair competition for a long time now, preferring to legislate against unfair competition by imposing tariffs (the bludgeon), passing antitrust laws (the rapier), etc. Vaughan Pratt