Citation statistics

[Loet Leydesdorff]

>
>  But what all this valuable, valid cautionary discussion overlooks is not
> only the possibility but the *empirically demonstrated fact* that there
> exist metrics that are highly correlated with human expert rankings.
>

Dear Steven,

It seems to me that it is difficult to generalize from one setting in which
human experts and certain ranks coincided to the *existence *of such
correlations across the board. Much may depend on how the experts are
selected. I did some research in which referee reports did not correlate
with citation and publication measures.

Human experts are necessarily selected from a population of experts, and it
is often difficult to delineate between fields of expertise. Similarly, we
know from quite some research that citation and publication practices are
field-specific and that fields are not so easy to delineate. Results may be
very sensitive to choices made, for example, in terms of citation windows.

Thus, I am bit doubtful about your claims of an "empirically demonstrated
fact."

With best wishes,


Loet
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