Library Management, General, Assessment 

Why bibliometrics is useful for understanding the global dynamics of science but generate perverse effects when applied inappropriately in research evaluation and university rankings.The research evaluation market is booming. "Ranking," "metrics," "h-index," and "impact factors" are reigning buzzwords. Government and research administrators want to evaluate everything -- teachers, professors, training programs, universities -- using quantitative indicators. Among the tools used to measure "research excellence," bibliometrics -- aggregate data on publications and citations -- has become dominant. Bibliometrics is hailed as an "objective" measure of research quality, a quantitative measure more useful than "subjective" and intuitive evaluation methods such as peer review that have been used since scientific papers were first published in the seventeenth century. In this book, Yves Gingras offers a spirited argument against an unquestioning reliance on bibliometrics as an indicator of research quality. Gingras shows that bibliometric rankings have no real scientific validity, rarely measuring what they pretend to.