> There are more papers than anyone can read. So how do you tell which ones are important? Let the researcher decide. When an academic applies for a job he/she

> There are more papers than anyone can read. So how do you tell which ones are important? Let the researcher decide. When an academic applies for a job he/she can attach his/her two or three most relevant papers. > And how do you objectively tell which professors are better than others at doing research? You can't, that's my point, the question makes no sense. > Whatever method you use, someone will try to game it. Then don't. Don't use a method. Evaluate a researcher by actually looking at her/his research. Yes, it takes longer to read a paper than to read a number. But the number makes no sense and who decided that we have to be in a hurry when deciding how to spend mostly-public money on research and researchers? That's actually a good question. What legitimacy have privately held journals, owned by publishers who sell back the results of research to the researchers who gave it to them for free (in the bast case scenario, sometimes you get to pay them to give it to them), to get this much influence on how to spend public money on research? Because that's pretty much what bibliometrics amounts to.