Saturday, November 20, 2010

Comment on the New York Times Article

This is from Paul Wouters at CWTS, Leiden University

"However, the reason for this high position is the performance of exactly one (1) academic: Mohamed El Naschie, who published 323 articles in the Elsevier journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals of which he is the founding editor. His articles frequently cite other articles in the same journal by the same author. On many indicators, the Alexandrian university does not score very high, but on the number of citations indicator the university scores 99.8 which puts it as the 4th most highly cited in the world. This result clearly does not make any sense at all. Apparently, the methodology used by the THES is not only problematic because it puts a high weight on surveys and perceived reputation. It is also problematic because the way the THES survey counts citations and makes them comparable across fields (in technical terms, the way these counts are normalized) is not able to filter out these forms of self-promotion by self-citations. In other words: the way the THES uses citation analysis does not meet one of the requirements of sound indicators: robustness against simple forms of manipulation."

BTW, to be a bit pedantic, it's not THES any more.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I couldn't possibly agree more with Paul, but you can see what kind of real damage a so bad flawed ranking like the actual made by the Times Higher Education is doing at all levels.

Anonymous said...

I have read a only one of the articles on your website now, and I extremely like your tastefulness of blogging. I added it to my favorites net page list and disposition be checking back soon. Cheer check into public notice my put as approvingly and leave to me be familiar with what you think. Thanks.

Anonymous said...

Lovely tajam posting. Tidak pernah berpikir bahwa itu adalah ini mudah. Extolment untuk Anda!