Ranking Web (Webometrics) of Universities

[Charles H. Davis]

Dear all,

While you chaps argue over the cabalistic esoterica of statistics, you 
may be ignoring something of more fundamental importance.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6098/1019.full

As a chemist, I have long argued against including people such as x-ray 
crystallogaphers as co-authors.  They're important, but so are all 
high-class technicians.  Whether they contribute to the intellectual 
content of an article is debatable.

Charles H. Davis, Ph.D.
______________________________________________________________
Senior Fellow, Indiana University at Bloomington
Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
http://mypage.iu.edu/~davisc/

Quoting Loet Leydesdorff <loet at LEYDESDORFF.NET>:

> Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe):
> http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html
>
>> But asking for it is not enough, action is needed. For example
>> consider the huge impact of the publication of Shanghai ranking
>> (ARWU) in 2003. Probably we can agree that it is merely high school
>> level bibliometrics, but this is not the important question. In my
>> humble opinion the success of ARWU is probably a illustrating a
>> collective failure of our discipline.
>
> Dear Isidro,
>
>
>
> We are making steps and reaching agreements in the field. For
> example, since Ahlgren et al. (2003) one increasingly began to use
> the cosine as a similarity measure. (Even I have given up on the
> superior Kulback-Leibler divergence, and the cosine is implemented in
> my software.) Similarly since a year or so, one can witness consensus
> about the top-10% most-cited papers as an excellence indicator.
> Granada and Leiden use it in the ranking; you use it, and Lutz and I
> use it in the overlays to Google Maps. We recently had a special
> issue of Scientometrics debating the impact factor as perhaps
> obsolete. Etc.
>
>
>
> We also know much more about how to count and evaluate citation
> distributions over publications. In my opinion, averaging is not such
> a good idea, but adding citation numbers to publication numbers?as
> you seem to advocate (?)?is perhaps even worse.
>
>
>
> In my opinion, one should mistrust any indicator for which no
> uncertainty (error bar) can be specified.
>
>
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Loet
>
>