Abstract
Bibliometric indicators such as the number of published articles and citations received are subject to a strong ambiguity. A high numerical value of bibliometric indicators may not measure the quality of scientific production, but only a high level of activity of a researcher. There may be cases of good researchers who do not produce a high number of articles, but have few research products of high quality. The sociology of science relies on the so-called “Matthew effect,” which is inspired by Matthew’s Gospel on Talents. “Those that have more will have more” seems to support the idea that those that publish more, merit to have higher bibliometric indicators, and to be recognized for their major results. But is this really the case? Can bibliometric indicators be considered a measure of the merit of scholars or they come from luck and chance? The answer is of fundamental importance to identify best practices in research assessment. In this work, using philosophical argumentation, we show how Christian theology, in particular St. Thomas Aquinas, can help us to clarify the concept of merit, overcoming the conceptual ambiguities and problems highlighted by the existing literature. By doing this, Christian theology, will allow us to introduce the evaluation framework in a broader perspective better suited to the interpretation of the complexity of research evaluation.
Highlights
The scientific productivity of researchers follows quantitative rules known since the last century
The aim of this work is to address the ambiguity of bibliometric indicators, that is, of what they measure and in particular whether they measure the merits of researchers rather than luck or chance, starting with the clarification of the concept of merit
We attempt to show the usefulness of Christian theology, or the science of faith, to clarify the concept of merit, overcoming the conceptual ambiguities and problems highlighted by the existing literature, as rightly emphasized by Sen (2000): “The idea of meritocracy may have many virtues, but clarity is not one of them. [. . .] Meritocracy, and more generally the practice of rewarding merit, is essentially underdefined, and we cannot be sure about its content—and about the claims regarding its “justice”—until some further specifications are made
Summary
The scientific productivity of researchers follows quantitative rules known since the last century. For every 100 authors who produce a single paper in a certain period, there are 25 with two, 11 with three, and so on Another well-known law is the Price’s law (De Solla Price, 1963) which refers to the relationship between the literature on a subject and the number of authors in the subject area, and states that half of the publications come from the square root of all contributors. These empirical laws can be linked to the so-called “Matthew effect,” based on the Parable of the Talents (see Supplementary Appendix 1 for the full text)” on which the sociology of science (Merton, 1973) developed. A rich literature has analyzed the skewness of scientific productivity distributions (Seglen, 1992) across the sciences (Albarrán et al, 2011; Ruiz-Castillo and Costas, 2014) and has investigated the connected cumulative advantages (Allison and Stewart, 1974) and the related inequalities (Allison, 1980; Allison et al, 1982)
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