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Academic sell-out: how an obsession with metrics and rankings is damaging academia

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journal contribution
posted on 2014-11-21, 14:51 authored by Thorsten GruberThorsten Gruber
Increasingly, academics have to demonstrate that their research has academic impact. Universities normally use journal rankings and journal impact factors to assess the research impact of individual academics. More recently, citation counts for individual articles and the h-index have also been used to measure the academic impact of academics. There are, however, several serious problems with relying on journal rankings, journal impact factors and citation counts. For example, articles without any impact may be published in highly ranked journals or journals with high impact factor, whereas articles with high impact could be published in lower ranked journals or journals with low impact factor. Citation counts can also be easily gamed and manipulated, and the h-index disadvantages early career academics. This paper discusses these and several other problems and suggests alternatives such as post-publication peer review and open-access journals.

History

School

  • Business and Economics

Department

  • Business

Published in

Journal of Marketing for Higher Education

Volume

24

Issue

2

Pages

165 - 177

Citation

GRUBER, T., 2014. Academic sell-out: how an obsession with metrics and rankings is damaging academia. Journal of Marketing for Higher Education, 24 (2), pp. 165 - 177.

Publisher

© Taylor and Francis

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2014

Notes

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published in the Journal of Marketing for Higher Education on 23 Oct 2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/08841241.2014.970248

ISSN

0884-1241

Language

  • en