0.31 European elephants in the room (are they the ones with the  (Page 2/9)

In his paper on Sustainability, Jerry makes a number of challenging comments about the problem of sustainability. This is a hot-button issue in Europe as well, but the terms of engagement with it are somewhat different. What follows over the next few pages is another perspective on the “elephant in the room,” therefore, one that emerges from a different geographical starting point and therefore takes in a few different sidebar issues as a result.

Expectations of scholarship 

In between the mega macro level of the universe of scholarly communication and the micro level of an individual scholar's interests and projects lie a number of mediating layers of culture and context, and in these the European perspective differs somewhat from that in North America.  European governmental subsidization of higher education has a number of exceptionally positive effects on society and education, not least among them the leveling of the financial playing field for access to university study.  It also, however, creates a system of administration and oversight that transcends not just the individual department or disciplinary unit but all of the institutions in the country.  The need to distribute resources “fairly” creates the need to measure and compare outputs, not just between the sciences and the humanities, but between large and small universities, rural and urban centers, and research versus teaching-focused institutions.  There is open recognition that institutional missions differ, that disciplinary norms of quality and impact differ, and that the presence or absence of quantifiable and comparable output measures of a scholarly communications ecosystem varies widely between the disciplines. Yet at the end of the day a certain exact number of Euros or Pounds must be allocated to each player in the system, and while there is no good way of making this determination, there are lots and lots of bad ones.

Although Eugene Garfield, the father of such approaches to scientific impact assessment as citation analysis and journal impact factors, was US-based, it is not surprising that his ideas and inventions have been embraced by European government departments of education and research councils alike.   Tools such as the “H-Index” provide an elegantly simple way of saying precisely where an individual scholar sits in the hierarchy of production, placing a simple numeric value on her contribution to her field, which can easily be compared with the numeric values of her colleagues and competitors.  The problem is that outside of a few relatively restricted areas, these simple indices are not representative of any accepted definition of either the quality or the impact of the work in question.  The fact that much of the bibliometrics system is built upon citation analysis, and that citation analysis is neither supported to the same level by such database tools as Thompson Reuters ISI or Elsevier’s Scopus for all areas, nor is as relevant for all areas as for, e.g., particle physics, means that our lovely simple system of numeric indices ranking scholarly work is as dodgy a basis for funding allocation across a national system as is the political connection of one’s local minister of state or, for that matter, a dart board.