Friday, December 03, 2010

Is there a Future for Citations?

simplification administrative has some caustic comments on the role of self-citation and reciprocal citation  in the remarkable performance of Alexandria University in the 2010 THE rankings.

The title, 'Bibliometry -- already broken', is perhaps unduly pessimistic but THE and Thomson Reuters are going to have to move quickly if they are to rescue their rankings. An obvious remedy would include removing self-citations and intra-university and intra-journal citations  from the count.

1 comment:

Jason said...

Hi Richard, I have a question. Do you know anything about the paperwork provided by Thomson Reuters to the universities, regarding Times Higher Education rankings? I am trying to determine whether it gave instructions as to who is eligible to be counted as faculty. El Naschie was at most an unpaid Honorary Professor, and surely shouldn't have had his paper citations counted. I want to know whether his being counted should be blamed on Thomson Reuters or on Alexandria University. See Alexandria University promotion of El Naschie? in this regard, and the comments.