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Ironically, here you are decrying a statistical model of impact factor and yearning for a higher level model of meaning in research.

• confluence 14y ago
  Not really - statistics helps to separate the impact from the link stuffers. Noam Chomsky may very well be a real life link farm or content stuffer. Hence why the impact/importance of the papers that link to him are important.
• andreasvc 14y ago
  I didn't imply a yearning for anything, I was just saying a citation can mean different things in different circumstances. I think you've fallen prey to the polarization that Chomsky is putting forth: either you are dealing with huge amounts of data and don't care about theory, or you're a rationalist whose theories don't need any empirical support. The reality of successful science is on neither of these extremes, of course. And by the way I do think that judging human performance by simple metrics is problematic, but not because it's statistics or not 'high-level', simply because it doesn't take enough information into account; it's a shortcut to the actual concept of quality, which is dangerous when metrics are used in decision-making. Automated metrics give an air of objectivity which an expert opinion doesn't have, even though the latter may well be much more informed.