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Peer Review … Flawed, But What’s Better?
Last week, in the UK, the REF (Research Excellence Framework) 2021 results were published, and where the key metrics for academic research were mainly built around published work in research journals and conferences. For some in academia, Daniel J Bernstein (djb) perhaps encapsulates the importance of publishing research work:
Along with this, published work often provides the foundation of PhD work and in the development of research careers for ECRs (Early Career Researchers). Also, when applying for academic posts, h-index and i10-index metrics are often used as a basic metric for the “quality” and “quantity” of someone’s research. A basic measure of the quality of an academic at one institution and another can come down to the number and scale of the citation metrics of their published work. And, the places that someone publishes is often assessed to, and where higher quality venues are often worth much more than those which are weaker. Unfortunately there are some venues, which will publish anything that is submitted, as long as someone pays their registration fee.
Few people in outside academia would have such crude (and public) measures on their career progress. Imagine if a…
