"Have you ever seen the Citation Indexes (CIs) for the year 1600? At that time, a very active community was working on the reconstruction of planetary movements by means of epicycles. In principle, any ellipse around the Sun may be approximated by sufficiently many epicycles around the Earth. This is a non-trivial geometrical task, especially given the lack of analytical tools (sums of series). And the books and papers of many talented geometers quoted one another. Scienti c knowledge, however, was already taking other directions. Science has a certain `inertia', it is prudent (at times, it has been exceedingly so, mostly for political or metaphysical reasons), but even under the best of conditions, we all know how diffcult it is to accept new ideas, to let them blossom in time, away from short-term pressures.
At best, CIs transform this slowness into a tool for judgement. If used unwisely, as is increasingly the case, they discourage people (young ones in particular) right from the outset from daring to think, from exploring new paths: how is it possible to nd a job today in the eld of science or to get tenure without the inertial consensus of the majority, of the largest research areas, imposed by CIs? So the avalanche e ect inhibits or even eliminates variety, which is at the core of culture and science. And the preventive effect against novelty is what we particularly fear.
[...]
Concerning editorial and publishing activities, in addition to the distortions in judgements induced by so-called `impact factors' for journals (see the ranking quoted below, which is fluctuating because ill-founded), further distortion is caused by having a very small number of self-selected commercial organisations assume the crucial task of deciding just `what' to index. From the perspective of this well-established journal, we observe that these organisations make it difficult for new journals to get indexed at all. In particular, authors who are consciously trying to break the stranglehold that a few expensive non-academic commercial publishers have on scienti c publishing are even more severely disadvantaged by these unreliable and arbitrary numerical evaluations."
MSCS Editorial Board
(excertos do texto "Editors' note: bibliometrics and the curators of orthodoxy", Math. Struct. in Comp. Science (2009), vol. 19, pp. 1-4 - Cambridge University Press)
At best, CIs transform this slowness into a tool for judgement. If used unwisely, as is increasingly the case, they discourage people (young ones in particular) right from the outset from daring to think, from exploring new paths: how is it possible to nd a job today in the eld of science or to get tenure without the inertial consensus of the majority, of the largest research areas, imposed by CIs? So the avalanche e ect inhibits or even eliminates variety, which is at the core of culture and science. And the preventive effect against novelty is what we particularly fear.
[...]
Concerning editorial and publishing activities, in addition to the distortions in judgements induced by so-called `impact factors' for journals (see the ranking quoted below, which is fluctuating because ill-founded), further distortion is caused by having a very small number of self-selected commercial organisations assume the crucial task of deciding just `what' to index. From the perspective of this well-established journal, we observe that these organisations make it difficult for new journals to get indexed at all. In particular, authors who are consciously trying to break the stranglehold that a few expensive non-academic commercial publishers have on scienti c publishing are even more severely disadvantaged by these unreliable and arbitrary numerical evaluations."
MSCS Editorial Board
(excertos do texto "Editors' note: bibliometrics and the curators of orthodoxy", Math. Struct. in Comp. Science (2009), vol. 19, pp. 1-4 - Cambridge University Press)
[cortesia de CCO]
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