On Wednesday, October 21 the all-Russian seminar "Mathematical methods of decision analysis in economics, finance and politics" was held

Speaker: Boris Mirkin (HSE, Russia)
Title: "The metric tide: evaluation of research impact"

Abstract

Since the sciences are becoming a popular occupation, one cannot help but recognize that the attention by governmental and other funding agencies to the quantitative measures (metrics) of research and researchers is not unreasonable. In my talk, I am going to comment on the current approaches to this as a bit too much indirect and propose a more suitable measurement system instead. The system should involve measurements of all the aspects of researchers’ work: quality of research results, organizational efforts, training of young students and researchers, social communication and industrial applications.

A special emphasis is given to the problem of evaluation of the quality of research results. Work by the author and M. Orlov is presented. This involves mapping the results to a taxonomy of the field and automated combining  of multiple criteria. Outlooks for developing and utilizing a system for manual and automated monitoring are presented.

Additional materials:

 Slides (PDF, 1.30 Мб)

 

References

1. The Metric Tide: Report of the Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management, July 2015, http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/rereports/Year/2015/metrictide/. 
2. B. Mirkin, M. Orlov (2014) RESEARCH IMPACT: LEVEL OF RESULTS, CITATION, MERIT. Working Paper WP7/2014/09http://www.hse.ru/data/2014/12/02/1104478267/WP7_2014_09_F.pdf, NRU HSE, Moscow RF.