impact and other metrics

I only just saw Aldo's link now: Arg! I don't know how you felt about it Aldo but this is exactly the kind of thing I was trying to whistle in the dark make fun of since I know this is actually quite serious and quite terrorizing.

In fact I was just noticing that Australia had changed their metrics for assessment of faculty impact and production (production metrics were earlier) when the Howard government lost and the Rudd government came in: they went from Research Quality Framework to Excellence in Research for Australia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RQF

The Wikipedia has only a journals list so far, which appears to be journals it is acceptable to publish in and with what rankings.

Somehow I think the maps and the territories are severely distorted here.... Just my own humble opinion, noting how little it is worth, and what small impact it is likely to have, and I double CINews publication will count....

Katie

Comment by AldoManutio Abruzzo on July 29, 2009 at 8:38am: Katie,

I find it utterly appalling (being as I'm considered a junior faculty member, having only started in February at this institution) and horrifying...

I have long been an advocate of open access in scholarly communication and a proponent of the use of digital and digitally-published materials for tenure. These kind of actions threaten any real advances in this area.

I understand "why" a funding agency has to come up with rubrics for determining who gets the slices of the rapidly diminishing pie (I spent two years on a academic grant committee, reviewed for the NHPRC), but I'm not convinced that this is the best approach.

Comment by Katie King (SL Katie Fenstalker) on July 29, 2009 at 8:48am: I wish I understood more carefully how the "metrics" approach has grabbed people's sense of what matters so forcefully. It's not surprising in particular communities of practice for whom numerical measurement has long been the standard of efficacy, but this has taken up people's imagination and somehow appealed to their sense of both fairness and accuracy on a level that astonishes me. I think we do need to think this through as part of the political economies find ourselves in today, and how they are shaping how people understand and perceive these things "fairness" and "accuracy."

impact and other metrics

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