Perhaps we should stop and look at the evils of citation analysis in science. Citation analysis began some 15 or 20 years ago with a useful thought that it might be nice to know if one’s scientific papers were being read and used by others working in the same area. But now it has morphed into a Godzilla that has the potential to run our lives. I think the current situation rests on three principles:

1. Your scientific ability can be measured by the number of citations you receive. This is patent nonsense.
2. The importance of your research is determined by which journals accept your papers. More nonsense.
3. Your long-term contribution to ecological science can be measured precisely by your h–score or some variant.

These principles appeal greatly to the administrators of science and to many people who dish out the money for scientific research. You can justify your decisions with numbers. Excellent job to make the research enterprise quantitative. The contrary view which I might hope is held by many scientists rests on three different principles:

1. Your scientific ability is difficult to measure and can only be approximately evaluated by another scientist working in your field. Science is a human enterprise not unlike music.
2. The importance of your research is impossible to determine in the short term of a few years, and in a subject like ecology probably will not be recognized for decades after it is published.
3. Your long-term contribution to ecological science will have little to do with how many citations you accumulate.

It will take a good historian to evaluate these alternative views of our science.

This whole issue would not matter except for the fact that it is eroding science hiring and science funding. The latest I have heard is that Norwegian universities are now given a large amount of money by the government if they publish a paper in SCIENCE or NATURE, and a very small amount of money if they publish the same results in the CANADIAN JOURNAL OF ZOOLOGY or – God forbid – the CANADIAN FIELD NATURALIST (or equivalent ‘lower class’ journals). I am not sure how many other universities will fall under this kind of reward-based publication scores. All of this is done I think because we do not wish to involve the human judgment factor in decision making. I suppose you could argue that this is a grand experiment like climate change (with no controls) – use these scores for 30 years and then see if they worked better than the old system based on human judgment. How does one evaluate such experiments?

NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council) in Canada has been trending in that direction in the last several years. In the eternal good old days scientists read research proposals and made judgments about the problem, the approach, and the likelihood of success of a research program. They took time to discuss at least some of the issues. But we move now into quantitative scores that replace human judgment, which I believe to be a very large mistake.

I view ecological research and practice much like I think medical research and medical practice operate. We do not know how well certain studies and experiment will work, any more than a surgeon knows exactly whether a particular technique or treatment will work or a particular young doctor will be a good surgeon, and we gain by experience in a mostly non-quantitative manner. Meanwhile we should encourage young scientists to try new ideas and studies, to give them opportunities based on judgments rather than on counts of papers or citations. Currently we want to rank everyone and every university like sporting teams and find out the winner. This is a destructive paradigm for science. It works for tennis but not for ecology.

Bornmann, L. & Marx, W. (2014) How to evaluate individual researchers working in the natural and life sciences meaningfully? A proposal of methods based on percentiles of citations. Scientometrics, 98, 487-509.

Leimu, R. & Koricheva, J. (2005) What determines the citation frequency of ecological papers? Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 20, 28-32.

Parker, J., Lortie, C. & Allesina, S. (2010) Characterizing a scientific elite: the social characteristics of the most highly cited scientists in environmental science and ecology. Scientometrics, 85, 129-143.

Todd, P.A., Yeo, D.C.J., Li, D. & Ladle, R.J. (2007) Citing practices in ecology: can we believe our own words? Oikos, 116, 1599-1601.