Can Scientific Quality Be Quantified?

Abstract

> “ … The first essential step in the direction of learning any subject is to find principles of numerical reckoning and practicable methods for measuring some quality connected with it. I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind .” > > —Baron William Thomson Kelvin1 There was a time in the not too distant past when the value of a scientific observation was determined simply by peer response to its communication. Through local lectures, presentations at national and international scientific meetings, and, ultimately, publication, the scientific community became aware of a new finding and assessed its potential importance and impact. Put another way, the quality of a scientific observation was determined by the extent of acclamation of the community within which it took root: Good scientists knew good science when they saw it. Full stop. Article see p 1038 With the advent of the digital revolution, the development of international databases of published articles, and the ready ability to analyze these data sets, things changed. Beginning in the 1950s,1 and cooperatively exploiting their natural tendency to measure phenomena in the world around them, members of the scientific and information communities began to conceive of bibliometric indices that might be used to define the impact of a scientific publication and the journal in which it was published. An initial impetus for developing the first of these parameters, the science citation index,3 was to assist librarians in managing bibliographic control and costs effectively. The citation index quantifies the number of citations a particular publication receives, and this information is used, in turn, to calculate a journal-specific parameter, the journal …