Why is John Ioannidis such a Bad-Ass?
“Overall, not only are most research findings false, but, furthermore, most of the true findings are not useful.”
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Open Science and the Certainty of Bias
… the idea of the scientist as a dispassionate and humble servant of their discipline is something that needs to be challenged.
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Bibliometrics, Scientometrics and Research Valuation
How do you know what constitutes ‘good science?’ It’s tough and yet that is the task that faces many researchers and institutions. Funders need to make those judgements in order to decide who does and doesn’t get support for their work. Institutions have an obligation to hire and promote on the basis of how good
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Cargo Cult Science
I have quite vivid memories of sitting in front of the (black and white) television as a child, watching documentaries about the cargo cults of the Pacific islands. They have largely faded away and I suspect that many of our students and younger researchers have never heard of them, but cargo cults were a big
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Does Teamwork Make For Better Science?
Teamwork as a personal characteristic and as a feature of the research enterprise is often, on faith, taken as an unalloyed good, But is that so? Personally, I have always liked the single author publication and I have admired the independent researcher. I think this attitude was shaped by early experiences being exposed to strong,
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Fraudulent authorship
The metrification of research assessment, one symptom of the corporatization of universities and research institutions, is especially driven by the perceived need of those who don’t really understand research to administer and oversee those who do. As a consequence, we see the ascent of metrics which are as easy to misinterpret as they are to
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What makes a good research environment?
It is probably a given that even those of us who are doing a pretty good job in research would like to do better. In this context, good research or better research might be loosely defined as research that brings about some good in the world; for example, the discovery of a more accurate diagnostic
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Few metrics on research funding organizations
We have talked about the overabundance of author-level metrics in research. This is a dynamic and not very pretty field right now, but the science of science is evolving quickly and consensus is developing around what are the better (and not so good) ways to evaluate researchers. Let’s for a moment, however, turn our attention
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Beam plots: a better tool for evaluating research output
The metrification of the research enterprise is inescapable but, used properly, brings a measure of fairness to the evaluation of researchers and research producing organizations. However, a drawback that we have discussed previously is that individual metrics provide only a pinhole view of the researcher or organization. We therefore need to appreciate the limitations of
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One More Author-Level Metric: the g-index
The list seems endless, but I thought I would include one more author-level metric before moving on. I wanted to talk a little bit about the g-index and how it compares with the h-index. Now there is nothing wrong with the h-index, as long as it is interpreted properly. In general, the h-index correlates well
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The H-Index: an author level metric
Previously, we have talked about a journal level metric, the journal impact factor (JIF), and an article level metric, the citation count. We have seen how both of these metrics might be related to, but are not direct measures of some quality of the author or authors – perhaps productivity. In this blog entry, we
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