[Coral-List] A student's guide to the h-index

[David Blakeway]

> Dear Coral List - I have been making stupid jokes & trying to be clever,
>> probably losing credibility because of that. But you can tell I am serious
>> about this topic, so please hear me out on this one.
>>
>>
>>
>> It might seem that the current system of citation metrics is working ok,
>> so leave well enough alone. My strong conviction is that it’s not, and that
>> this is genuinely impeding science.
>>
>>
>>
>> Here’s my proposition: the most likely citation rate for the highest
>> quality research paper is zero.
>>
>>
>>
>> This clearly seems a false proposition, but we have to be careful. Our
>> reflex ‘false’ reaction only occurs because we have accepted the axiom of
>> the current system: that citations are a true measure of quality, i.e.
>> low-quality papers have few citations and high-quality papers have many
>> citations. If we instead define quality as ‘understanding nature’, it’s
>> inevitable that some low-quality papers will have many citations and some
>> high-quality papers will have few citations.
>>
>>
>>
>> It seems to me the very highest quality papers are unlikely to be cited
>> at all, because they are transcendental: they have revolutionised the field
>> but nobody knows that. Because the concepts can’t be parsed within the
>> existing paradigm, the paper is dismissed as low-quality, and it floats
>> away with all the other genuinely low-quality papers.
>>
>>
>>
>> Unless of course, the paper has been written by a highly-cited scientist.
>> In that case we take it seriously. But the highly-cited scientist isn’t
>> likely to write this type of paper because they’re in the paradigm. They
>> may have built the paradigm.
>>
>>
>>
>> How many of these papers are we missing? I think it’s substantial.
>>
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