Sounds like Pubmed-Fight http://www.pubmedfight.com/ :-) - Pierre Lindenbaum

Nice site! But that would only be part of the fight... - Egon Willighagen

"Willighagen E( 9 publications) est victorieux avec 4 publications de plus que Lindenbaum P ( 5 publications)." :) Sorry, just could not resists :) - Egon Willighagen

Oh, this is a clear example that citation count is way too simplistic ... - Egon Willighagen

:-)) - Pierre Lindenbaum

I wonder what many a PI would say about such a system - Deepak Singh

"am-I-hot-or-not" for scientists? - dK

No, a social science-impact factor. - Egon Willighagen

isn't that exactly what the science citation index is about? just without the web2.0 shebang and only people from the same field vote by citation? - dK

No, because a citation can be anything... "have you seen this crappy research? I just cite it as related work we 'improve' on"... citations do not provide ranking information. Or? - Egon Willighagen

The only thing you'd get by doing this is who's in the news, not impact or quality. Assessment of quality is such a complicated task that it has to be personally done by competent individuals who are familiar with the work of the individual in question. This takes a significant effort which can't be captured by this shallow of an approach, and the results are only useful within each narrow field of research. Systems like this are also extremely vulnerable to gaming. - Mr. Gunn

Since a significant effort is already put into grant reviews, you could simply average across grant review scores to capture this, and weight it by the size of the grant awarded. Then the confounding factor is the cost of research among disciplines. But, if you just want a "name recognition index", your method would be fine. - Mr. Gunn

Mr. Gunn... it seems you have more experience in this than I do. It's a shame that we do not seem to be able to do better than current systems. - Egon Willighagen

I really don't have any personal experience, I've just spent a couple years listening to the smart people who do. How you do it depends on what you're looking to do, obviously. A name recognition index could be useful, if only to find out who the attention whores are. ;-) - Mr. Gunn

Another problem -- "Hooker CW ( 21 publications ) est victorieux avec 12 publications de plus que Willighagen E ( 9 publications)" -- that a working Researcher ID could solve. (I don't have 21 publications!) - Bill Hooker

I'm waiting for the ResearcherID talk to be subsumed into the larger OpenID conversation. Anonymity is impossible nowadays, so maybe people will start taking online identity seriously now. - Mr. Gunn

I really believe that any identity namespace requires some granularity, one than can be linked with researcher id's and the like. What we don't want to do is reinvent the wheel and come up with some other, random standard for scientific identity - Deepak Singh

What is the value of a unidimensional ranking of people, based on whatever single 'summary statistic' or 'impact factor'? Isn't this bound to be an unacceptable reduction in most of the cases? - Thomas Lemberger

Thomas, you just said what it took me 1000+ characters to say. I think this community has a pro-measurement bias, and the more measurements the better, as long as they're not used where inappropriate. I worry about mission creep much like we've seen with FICO scores in the US. - Mr. Gunn

Thomas Lemberger - When you're hiring (or awarding grants) there's simply no alternative: you're trying to rank applicants one against the other, and effectively end up with a rank order. - Michael Nielsen

I'm one of those who thinks that multiple metrics would be better than reliance on any single measure, especially the dreadful Impact Factor. I don't think that granting/hiring/tenure committees are likely to succumb to One Number To Rule Them All the way financial insitutions prostrate themselves before FICO. - Bill Hooker

Michael, I think the issue Thomas had was using one number to rank people up front. Certainly the metric is included in grant funding deliberations, but isn't the only deciding factor. PhysioProf, for example, talks about pulling grants from the wrong side of the pay line, showing the importance of non-IF related factors in getting funding. - Mr. Gunn

I agree. Rather than finding illusory 'universal' metrics, it would be more important to have (controlled) access to the relevant information that describes the many aspects of individual scientific impact (publishing, reviewing, commenting, etc...). This is why I find the concept of AuthorID coupled with 'scientific activity feeds' the most attractive. If the information is there, ad-hoc metrics can be defined or perhaps (less geeky) it can be used with a good dose human judgment...;-) - Thomas Lemberger