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> which not just the number of publications is counted, but also their impact (citations/yr). But that is completely flawed! Some research areas (which is inco

• ylem 16y ago
  How do you judge that? If you write a paper and no one cites it, is it important (a tree falls in a forest...)? This is a serious question--I agree that h-index is vulnerable to fads, but if one adds aging (the effect of citations decays with time, so if people stop citing the paper when the fad passes, then the h-index decays--for researchers who are post tenure and intend to stay in the field, they can think long-term) then it's hard to think of a better way. There are so many papers produced (the number of researchers is huge) that I don't see a feasible way of judging research outside of using "crowds"--aka citations....I suppose that one could try to look at page-rank (based on citations as links) as a proxy for citations (I think this has been done) and use it to remove the academic equivalent of link farms--but there are legitimate uses of cross-citing. For example, imagine that you have group 1 with technique A and group 2 with technique B that work in a similar problem space. It might be very natural for them to cite each other if they disagree or agree with each other. This may happen several times--it's not malicious, just economics at work (even if both groups could afford both sets of techniques and one of the groups was really good at both techniques, it would make sense for them to only pursue one--comparative advantage).... What is your solution?