Ranking Web (Webometrics) of Universities

Sun Sep 9 15:34:09 EDT 2012

Dear David,

For the record, I agree with you and hope that you will extend your 
informal research to a larger one that's published widely.

You're also correct that my concern is more ethical than metric, 
although the former obviously affects the latter.

I remember mentioning my concerns publicly at a meeting a while back 
and was pleased to discover that my fellow senior citizen, Gene 
Garfield, shared at least some of my concerns.

Cordially,

Charles
_______________________________________
Charles H. Davis, Ph.D.
http://mypage.iu.edu/~davisc/

Quoting David Wojick <dwojick at CRAIGELLACHIE.US>:

> Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe):
> http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html
>
> Dear Charles,
>
> I did some informal research recently that suggests that there is a
> standard pattern in the ordering of co-authors. The junior people who
> do the actual research come first. The senior people who manage their
> work come last. The instrumentalists who support the work are in the
> middle. One might try to take this into account algorithmically, I
> suppose. But it is certainly the case that the instrumentalists
> sometimes make major contributions to the work, including
> breakthroughs, so they cannot simply be discounted. If your concern
> is merely that people are being included who did nothing significant,
> that does not seem like a metric issue, more of an ethical one.
>
> My Best Regards,
>
> David E. Wojick, Ph.D.
>
> David
>
> At 11:16 AM 9/9/2012, you wrote:
>> Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe):
>> http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html
>>
>> Dear Isidro, et al. --
>>
>> Point taken.  However, these are exceptional examples.  I did not
>> mean to impugn the work of crystallographers of such caliber.  I did
>> mean to point out that much of their work is routine.  Moreover,
>> many of the people, not necessarily crystallographers, who make
>> comparatively slight contributions to an article would in the past
>> have been placed in an acknowledgement, not as co-authors.
>>
>> Acknowledgements are important too, but placing scores of people as
>> co-authors greatly complicates assessing who is responsible for what.
>>
>> See for example:
>> http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/%28SICI%291097-4571%28199312%2944:10%3C590::AID-ASI5%3E3.0.CO;2-U/abstract
>>
>> In this paper, Davis (c'est moi) and Cronin point out that
>> acknowledgments follow a power curve, perhaps a factor inducing the
>> placement of people as co-authors in this era of publish and/or
>> perish.
>>
>> I have no objection to including as co-authors either
>> crystallographers or anyone else who makes a substantive
>> intellectual contribution to a research project and its resulting
>> publication.
>>
>> Cordially,
>>
>> Charles H. Davis, Ph.D.
>> ________________________________
>> http://mypage.iu.edu/~davisc/
>>
>>
>> Quoting "Isidro F. Aguillo" <isidro.aguillo at CCHS.CSIC.ES>:
>>
>>> Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe):
>>> http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> CRYSTALLOGRAPHY AND THE NOBEL PRIZE
>>>
>>> There have been 12 Nobel Prizes in chemistry and physiology or
>>> medicine awarded for work in the field of crystallography from 1956
>>> to 2006. Almost one in four chemistry prizes since 1956 have been for
>>> structure work, and in the last decade fully half have dealt with
>>> work related to macromolecular structure. From 1970 to 2006, 4% of
>>> all chemistry publications dealt with crystallography, yet this
>>> subfield captured 19% of the available Nobel Prizes. During the past
>>> decade, crystallography papers represented 7% of all chemistry
>>> publications, but commanded 4 of 10 available prizes. Overall, the
>>> Nobel Prizes in chemistry are noticeably enriched for work in
>>> macromolecular structure determination. Macromolecular structure
>>> determination is a potent tool to understand biological systems and
>>> periodically yields landmark results that impact the scientific
>>> community at large. It would also seem that the surest road to
>>> Stockholm is through a crystal tray. From a letter from Michael
>>> Seringhaus and Mark Gerstein, Science, January 2007 (Vol. 315, p. 412)
>>>
>>> Quoting "Charles H. Davis":
>>>
>>>> Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe):
>>>> http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html
>>>>
>>>> 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
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Isidro F. Aguillo, HonPhD
>>> Cybermetrics Lab (3C1). CCHS - CSIC
>>> Albasanz, 26-28. 28037 Madrid. Spain
>>>
>>> isidro.aguillo @ cchs.csic.es
>>> www. webometrics.info
>
>