New CACM article on "publications ranking"

[Stephen J Bensman]

Everybody has a better mouse trap.  In respect to US academic rankings, the only ones that count are the ones done by the US National Research Council, the American Council on Education, etc., and these are done every 10-15 years or so.  There is one being conducted now.  Not to worry though.  At top the rankings have remained the same for about a century, and despite all the new sophisticated techniques with publications, citations, etc. they arrive at basically the same the results that were obtained by Cattell in 1910 and Hughes in 1924 with crude opinion surveys.  There are new fields and all that, but the universities dominant in the new fields are the ones that were dominant in the old fields.  Your institution is one of these, and it is an outlier, because most dominant universities have programs with large numbers of faculty, but Hopkins makes it to the top on a small faculty base.  You should study the historical reasons for this.  It is a very interesting case.
 
SB

________________________________

From: ASIS&T Special Interest Group on Metrics on behalf of Pikas, Christina K.
Sent: Fri 5/25/2007 1:07 PM
To: SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU
Subject: [SIGMETRICS] New CACM article on "publications ranking"



Sigh.  It just seems so superficial and so not useful... basically based on production.  The lead author is from Google -- makes you wonder if this is a new product?

Ren, J. and Taylor, R. N. 2007. Automatic and versatile publications ranking for research institutions and scholars. Commun. ACM 50, 6 (Jun. 2007), 81-85. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1247001.1247010

Christina K. Pikas, MLS
R.E. Gibson Library & Information Center
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
Voice  240.228.4812 (Washington), 443.778.4812 (Baltimore)
Fax 443.778.5353 

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