3 ms·

Toward a University Department of Generalists

• bsldld 6y ago
  "Department of Generalists", is that another name for Liberal Arts?
• op03 6y ago
  The 'publication range' metric is a good idea. Would be interesting to see rankings.
• gus_massa 6y ago
  The main problem is that is much easier to publish a continuation of a previous work than a paper in a brand new area. It´t is easier to understand in a lab. If you were using a microscope to look cell and the new area needs a Geiger counter, you need to buy one. In theoretical research it's more difficult to explain, but in many cases you need to know how to use the public software and also have a lot of custom software. So to start a new research line, you need to learn or rewrite them. And there are also some knowledge about which areas are interesting, and which journals are friendly. So the Department of Generalist perhaps will get more wide and interesting results, but in the final statistics they will have only a half (or less) of published articles. And if you don't win a Nobel prize, when the University needs fundraising people only car about silly metrics like total publication ammount. > Weighted by quality of course. That's the hard part.