Research Evaluation Quotes

The post-war "publish or perish" tyranny must end. The profession has become obsessed with quantity rather than quality. [...] One brilliant article should outweigh one mediocre book.

The scientist-community guy may get a $500,000 grant, and if his equipment works or doesn't work, he still gets a gold star for doing the science experiment. For me, there is no merit in anything for doing an experiment; I have to go home with pictures.

NSF is the only federal agency with a proven track record of selecting education projects through a rigorous, careful and competitive process that draws on a wide variety of experts from outside government.

Because he did not have time to read every new book in his field, the great Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski used a simple and efficient method of deciding which ones were worth his attention: Upon receiving a new book, he immediately checked the index to see if his name was cited, and how often. The more "Malinowski" the more compelling the book. No "Malinowski", and he doubted the subject of the book was anthropology at all.

I suspect that the peer-review system carries a good part of blame for the fact that something like sixty percent or more of journal articles are never quoted (which means leaving no trace on our joint scholarly pursuits), and (in my reception at any rate) the "learned journals" (with a few miraculous exceptions that entail, prominently, TCS) ooze monumental boredom.

It is common, and encouraged by many journals, for research to be judged by the impact factor of the journal that publishes it. But as a journal's score is an average, it says little about the quality of any individual piece of research.

I believe that research, that you can claim that you're doing research only if half of the people, and I'm talking about half of the experts, believe that the goal is impossible.

Most of the papers which are submitted to the Physical Review are rejected, not because it is impossible to understand them, but because it is possible. Those which are impossible to understand are usually published.

I was an embarrassment to the department when they did research assessment exercises. A message would go round the department: 'Please give a list of your recent publications.' And I would send back a statement: 'None.'