Rudy Professor Emeritus of Information Science, Blaise Cronin, gave an invited talk at Georgetown University in Washington, DC on October 20, 2015. His presentation was entitled: “A Fetish Too Far? (Alt)metrics in the Groves of Academe” (see abstract below).
- Impact indicators of questionable validity, limited reliability and dubious utility are everywhere in use, often employed by people who should know better. Scholars, research groups, academic departments and universities are now routinely subjected to metrics-based evaluation. We have moved in a short period of time from relatively crude counting of publications, citations, and downloads to the harvesting of a (growing) variety of social media-generated data (mentions, likes, recommendations, ratings, etc.) that purportedly help us better understand the ‘true contributions’ of a scholar. The institutionalization of impact assessment is moving forward ineluctably on two fronts: extramurally, funding bodies are seeking to quantify the downstream value of the research they bankroll; intramurally, provosts and others are trying to sort the presumptive wheat from the chaff. Is there, one wonders, a point at which the emerging ‘audit culture’ simply collapses under its own weight, a point at which triviality trumps transparency, a point at which narcissism substitutes for critical reflexivity?
Dr. Cronin’s talk was a part of the Georgetown University Library’s Scholarly Communication Symposium. The theme of this year’s Symposium was “Assessing Impact: Altmetrics” – with the key question being “how can we best measure the quality and impact of scholarship in a world where the way in which scholars and researchers communicate has evolved far beyond the printed book or journal article.”