I have earlier written about the increasing use of metric methods to evaluate the quality of scientists (see Is it possible to measure the quality of a scientist? ), where I discussed the consequences of more and more relying on these methods exclusively for evaluating scientists applying for funding or tenure.

This entire topic is now being treated thoroughly in a new theme section - The use and misuse of bibliometric indices in evaluating scholarly performance – of the journal Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics. The theme section is open source and can be found here .

Over all there is considerably worry in academic circles that the increasing use of metric methods will govern the choice of scientists and result in a decrease of diversity in the scope of science projects.

One paper deals with the consequences of the increasing use of metrics for the evaluation of young scientists in particular. PhD students and postdocs require papers in high impact journals to further their academic careers. The consequence is that they have to adapt their research so that it is suitable for publication in these high impact journals, which typically will be research on hot topics (currently nanotechnology and climate change among others), medical research of relevance to ‘important’ diseases (HIV and cancer) and surprising or weird science that can be explained briefly (for instance new types of animal behaviour or interactions). These types of research, however, are not always the best and most promising for the future. If the younger more productive researchers exclusively focus on ‘sexy’ science, it will have dire consequences for basic research in the future and ultimately for the society.

The conclusion is that although metric methods (especially the newer ones, which take discipline and factors such as lead/sole author and number of time their papers are cited into consideration) have their usage, it is vital not to forgot to the individual qualitative evaluation of the quality of a scientist.