Abstract
Scientific merit is commonly assessed through a researcher’s number of publications, or other citation metrics. However this procedure has been criticized as being biased, unfair and not representative of the true contribution of academic researchers to the advancement of science. Notably, citation metrics have been found to be detrimental to the assessment of female researchers’ achievement and maybe to women’s representation in academia. Yet very little is known about the real causes of differential gender representation in science. In this paper, I discuss these causes, and argue that recently proposed improvements in favour of more equal opportunities may instead generate other inequalities. I also anticipate that discriminative guidelines, if employed, should take other potentially disadvantaged communities into account and eventually promote communitarianism in science. I conclude that science as a whole has a lot more to gain by adopting a multi-dimensional, universal, and qualitative perspective when assessing scientific merit.
Highlights
The objective assessment of scientific merit is an important matter of concern, as tough competition for research positions and funding programs has promoted the need to reliably evaluate researchers’ qualities (Acuna et al 2012)
An implicit consensus in the scientific community consists in assessing academic researchers through their number of publications, or using different citation metrics such as the h-index (Franceschini et al 2012)
Despite the many critiques provided against the biases and unfairness generated by a thorough and extensive reliance on citation metrics (Leimu and Koricheva 2005, Lawrence 2006, 2007, 2008, Neylon and Wu 2009, Fisher et al 2012, Kaushal and Jeschke 2013), scientific merit is virtually never assessed by taking multiple dimensions of a researcher’s work into account (Wilson 2006, Lawrence 2007, Neylon and Wu 2009, Lane 2010, McDade et al 2011, Kaushal and Jeschke 2013)
Summary
The objective assessment of scientific merit is an important matter of concern, as tough competition for research positions and funding programs has promoted the need to reliably evaluate researchers’ qualities (Acuna et al 2012). An implicit consensus in the scientific community consists in assessing academic researchers through their number of publications, or using different citation metrics such as the h-index (Franceschini et al 2012). (Pavlou and Diamandis 2011) It de facto makes science a multidimensional activity for which researchers have precisely been hired, but to which researchers’ relative contribution differs. It follows that citation metrics are very unlikely to capture the overall contribution of academic researchers. The aim of the present paper is twofold: briefly discussing the causes of gender representation in science, which are thought to result in part from unfair citation metrics, and questioning the solutions put forward to make the assessment of female and male iee 6 (2013)
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