Hefce backs off citations in favour of peer review in REF

[Stevan Harnad]

On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 9:25 AM, Stephen J Bensman <notsjb at lsu.edu> wrote:

> that is pretty much how Garfield recommended citations should be used and
> how they are used in US evaluations.  You don’t use citations by themselves
> but to balance your subjective judgments.
>
Gene is of course right that citations alone are not and never were enough
for research evaluation; they not only need to be "balanced" against
subjective (peer expert) evaluations, but they need to be formally validated
against them, discipline by discipline.

Moreover, it's not just about citations any more. A growing battery of
research performance metrics need to be jointly validated and initialized
against peer ranking. That's what the UK RAE/REF makes possible, uniquely,
at a national, pandisciplinary scale. http://bit.ly/etLvL

Until the full-scale joint validation exercise is conducted and analyzed,
discipline by discipline, no one can say what percentage of the variance in
the peer rankings the metric battery can predict. If it's 20-40%, then
metrics can only be advisory, merely supplementary adjuncts to the more
expensive and time-consuming peer rankings; if it's 70-90%, then it's the
peer rankings that are the supplementary adjuncts to the metrics.

Stevan Harnad

On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 9:25 AM, Stephen J Bensman <notsjb at lsu.edu> wrote:

I hate to say it, but that is pretty much how Garfield recommended citations
> should be used and how they are used in US evaluations.  You don’t use
> citations by themselves but to balance your subjective judgments.  For
> Garfield’s recommendations, see the two URL below:
>
> http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v6p354y1983.pdf
>
>  http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v6p363y1983.pdf
>
> For the most the most recent US National Research Council Data and
> methodology, see the following URLs:
>
> http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/researchdoc/
>
> http://sites.nationalacademies.org/pga/Resdoc/index.htm
>
> Given the politics of the thing, nobody in his right mind would use a
> purely metric approach, if he/she had any instinct for survival.
>
> Stephen J. Bensman
>
> LSU Libraries
>
> Louisiana State University
>
> Baton Rouge, LA   70803
>
> USA
>
> notsjb at lsu.edu
>
> *From:* ASIS&T Special Interest Group on Metrics [mailto:
> SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU] *On Behalf Of *Stevan Harnad
> *Sent:* Wednesday, June 24, 2009 3:26 AM
> *To:* SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU
> *Subject:* [SIGMETRICS] Hefce backs off citations in favour of peer review
> in REF
>
Hefce backs off citations in favour of peer review in REF
>
> 18 June 2009
>
> By *Zoë Corbyn*<http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/biography.asp?contact=20>
>
> *Research assessments in hard sciences will now be 'informed' by
> bibliometrics. Zoe Corbyn writes*
>
> The use of citations to determine the quality of academic work in the hard
> sciences is to be abandoned in favour of peer review in the new system being
> designed to replace the research assessment exercise.
>
> However, information about the number of citations a scholar's work accrues
> could be provided to assessment panels to help "inform" their judgments in a
> range of subjects....
>
>
> http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=407041&c=1
>
> ·         *Richard Hull* 20 June, 2009
>
> So finally common sense prevails. But I would now like to know exactly
> which stupid, thoughtless person, blinded by the New Labour mantra of
> "evidence-based this that and the other", first proposed the hair-brained
> idea to use citations?? Time for some journalistic digging, I think. This
> person must be exposed, as they have effectively wasted a huge amount of the
> time and energy of HEFCE and indeed the academics who actively opposed the
> idea.
>
> ·         *Stevan Harnad* 22 June, 2009
>
> It's probably alright that instead of scrapping panel rankings altogether
> and hard-wiring the outcome to metrics, the new REF will continuing doing
> rankings and metrics in parallel, using the metrics as advisory rather than
> binding.
>
That's fine; it will give the metrics a better chance to be cross-validated
> against peer judgment (though the hybrid metric-influenced rankings of the
> new REF will not be as independent a criterion against which to validate
> metrics as the RAE rankings were, when they were not influenced by
> metrics).
>
> The important thing is to make the battery of candidate metrics as broad
> and rich as possible. It is true that metrics today are still relatively
> sparse, but with the growth of open access and a rich variety of web-based
> metrics emerging therefrom, the power and scope of metrics will now grow and
> grow.
>
> About the possibility of abuse: Yes, one can abuse individual metrics.
> Downloads are the easiest to abuse. But genuine downloads generate genuine
> citations, and the correlation is there and can be measured. There are other
> intercorrelations in multiple metric profiles too. There are
> endogamy/exogamy metrics: Self-citations, co-author citations, author-circle
> citations, same-institution citations, same-journal citations. With these,
> anomalies and abuses can be detected, named and shamed.
>
> Multiple metrics create a pattern, a profile. If you artificially
> manipulate one of them (say, downloads, or citing others in your
> institution) it will be detectable as a deviation from the normal profile.
> Once a few of these abuses are prominently exposed and shamed, that will
> create a strong deterrent against trying such tricks, since the objective is
> the exact opposite: to increase one's prestige, not to tarnish it.
>
> And unlike (some) individual metrics, multiple metric profiles are almost
> impossible to manipulate jointly: Try writing software to generate bogus
> downloads of your work looking as if they all come from different IPs the
> world over, *and then try to generate the non-institutional citations that
> would normally be the correlate of such high downloads*. Even that
> 2-metric trick is not easy to accomplish!
>
> Stevan Harnad University of Southampton
>
> *REPLY TO RICHARD HULL: ON EXPOSING THE CULPRIT* -- Harnad, S. (2001)
> Research access, impact and assessment. Times Higher Education Supplement
> 1487: p. 16. http://cogprints.org/1683/
>
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