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In an earlier post I started talking about bibliometrics, some of its flaws, and what I think has become one of the facets of an ideology, something Jerry Z. Muller called “The tyranny of metrics”. I’m going to add two ways to enlarge your H-index that, at the same time, also represent a totally legitimate action in the overall context of a line research.
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You might know that I’m the coordinator of a master’s degree, in Italy. Ennio Flaiano, an Italian screenwriter, playwright, novelist, journalist, author of numerous enlightening aphorisms, said that:
In Italy the shortest line between two points is the arabesque
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Some time ago, I made a post on contributing to the Internet public good game. I want to follow up with a couple curious trajectories of photos I took and shared on Pixabay.
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The so-called AI Act has been agreed upon by the EU Parliament and member states. The news is about the formal agreement among these not necessarily aligned actors, more than the content of the regulation, which still needs to be adopted by the Parliament and Council to be become EU law. Contents were in fact mostly defined beforehand, although some details, such as exceptions to the regulations for national security, specific crimes, and military/defense systems were defined in the last negotiation.
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I think that a very relevant recent news passed us by with little attention by the academic sector. It’s definitely worth reminding it to myself and to the few readers of my blog.
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I don’t think I can really add something to the debate on research assessment. But maybe I can do something useful, at least to those that did not follow thoroughly the subject. I can provide a summary with some selected readings.
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A few weeks ago I wrote a post about participating the public goods game of the academia by reviewing papers. That’s important, and in a sense irrespectively of the quality of the review.
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I immediately admit that I have a preference for small scale events.
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A recent preprint captured my attention, and very likely this is due to the fact that it confirms and provides a systematic quantitative support to a personal notion. I directly use author’s words without filters:
“Total articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science have grown exponentially in recent years; in 2022 the article total was 47% higher than in 2016, which has outpaced the limited growth, if any, in the number of practising scientists. Thus, publication workload per scientist (writing, reviewing, editing) has increased dramatically. We define this problem as the strain on scientific publishing.” - The strain on scientific publishing. Mark A. Hanson, Pablo Gómez Barreiro, Paolo Crosetto, Dan Brockington
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The higher education system, and the mainstream shared conception is that high levels of specialization are desirable, and useful at the individual level. If we project this kind of idea as the most shared principle driving individual training from high-school, to university, and potentially grad-school, we end up with a population of specialists. I’ve read a book on the advantages of being a generalist (Range, by David Epstein) rather than having an early specialization, but surely one side effect of focusing intensely on something and not wasting time on other things is that we tend to become ignorant on any other subject outside our area of specialization.
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