Feature
As scholarly publishing communities search for the
Measuring in context
meaning behind metrics, the need for context is becoming crystal clear, reports Rebecca Pool
At a time when much of the world was waking up to Coronavirus, and China was through its worst, Chinese science and education ministries released guidelines regulating the use of the Science Citation Index (SCI) in research institutions. In short, Chinese institutions were told to stop evaluating, promoting or recruiting researchers based on their numbers of published papers and citations. And at the same time, payments for publishing in journals were to end.
4 Research Information June/July 2020 In China, a key indicator to evaluate
a researcher, allocate funding and also rank an institution, has been the metrics collected by Clarivate Analytics’ SCI on around 9,000 journals. This practise led to China becoming second in the world – only to the US – for publishing research papers in international journals but also raised concerns that some researchers were prioritising research quantity over quality. Indeed, the metrics-focused approach is considered to have led to some
researchers submitting plagiarised papers, excessively citing their own articles and even hijacking peer review processes and reviewing their research. As the Chinese ministries’ statement lay out: ‘It is inappropriate for higher education institutions to set paper publication requirements... a sound assessment system should be developed, in which different weight of paper publication is put on the evaluation of different types of scientific research work.’
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