For a very large chunk of my week, I'm in a world dominated with acronyms. One of those is "P&T", which stands for "promotion and tenure", which is how academics get from assistant professor to associate and full. The P&T committee meetings (from the way I understand it) meet to evaluate academics' merit in three big areas: teaching, service, and research.
Research is the big one - maybe not on paper, you could have a 40-20-40 teaching-service-research split - but your worth as a an academic in a research-oriented institution is measured by your publications. How many, and in what sort of journal (i.e. it doesn't "count" for nearly as much if it's not peer-reviewed, and international journals count more and then there's the prestige of particular journals.
Now enter Google Scholar. At this point, I can type in my name, and see my articles and click on the citations to see how many people in what articles have cited my paper - and who in turn cites them and so forth. Neat (and intimidating). Right now, it looks to me like the ranking is just based on absolute numbers of citations. But it also seems like just a tiny step to apply the Google web-ranking algorithm to citations, so that we spit out a "scholar rank" of x based on number and quality (ie. rank of citing articles) of citations. Your scholar rank would then indicate how well you are regarded in the scholarly community.
I know, I know, there are huge drawbacks: there are topics that aren't discussed very often, thus you could have the seminal paper on your topic, but only the six other papers ever written on it would be citing you. Furthermore, I know that research topic is heavily influenced by funding availability, which in turn relates to politics. Thus, you could be dismissed as not a particularly great scholar by scholar rank because you are not doing mainstream research...
But still: I'm at the "neat! cool!" stage. Even though I know that if someone cites you, that doesn't mean he necessarily read your paper (cynical? no, not me) - it's still a bit on the ego-boosting side.
Job interviews in academe, however, may never be the same again.
Posted by Johanna at November 23, 2004 11:18 AM