It makes a case that this is less of an issue than one might think. It is surely the case that influence is only imperfectly measured by citation counts, and that there may be types of systematic (as opposed to classical).
On the other hand, what the author does not emphasize is that a more important question is the fraction of research activity that would not pass an ex ante social cost-benefit test if the researcher's private incentives (e.g. getting tenure and/or raises) were omitted from the calculation. I suspect that there is quite a lot of such research.
No comments:
Post a Comment