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Research Evaluation

8.13.7 Alberts’s Warning Against “me-too science”
(Alberts, 2013)

Bruce Alberts, former president of the National Academy of Sciences of
the USA and former Editor-in-Chief of the journal Science, wrote in an
editorial supporting the DORA declaration:
... perhaps the most destructive result of any automated scoring of a research-
er’s quality is that it encourages “me-too science”. Any evaluation system in
which the mere number of a researcher’s publications increases his or her score
creates a strong disincentive to pursue risky and potentially groundbreaking
work, because it takes years to create a new approach in a new experimental
context, during which no publications should be expected. Such metrics further
block innovation because they encourage scientists to work in areas of science
that are already highly populated, as it is only in these fields that large numbers
of scientists can be expected to reference one’s work, ... only the very bravest
of young scientists can be expected to venture into such a poorly populated
research area, unless automated numerical evaluations of individuals are
eliminated.
The leaders of the scientific enterprise must accept full responsibility for thought-
fully analyzing the scientific contributions of other researchers. To do so in a
meaningful way requires the actual reading of a small selected set of each
researcher’s publications, a task that must not be passed by default to journal
editors.
We fully agree with these thoughtful observations and note that they
are not in disagreement with the contents of the Leiden Manifesto (Hicks
et al., 2015).

8.14 CONCLUSION
Although research evaluation should be performed by peers, bibliometric
expertise is needed and counting is a necessity. Because of differences in
research aims such evaluations are not context-free, reflection is needed
and one should realize that the research environment changes because it is
measured.
Perutz (2002), with Cambridge University in mind, wrote that crea-
tivity in science, as in the arts, cannot really be organized. It arises sponta-
neously from individual talent. Well-run laboratories can foster it, but
bureaucrats organizing research evaluations based on self-evaluation
reports, lots of numbers (purely number-crunching scientometrics)
and expensive site visitations by so-called experts can kill it. All too often
scientists complain about hierarchical organizations, inflexible, bureaucratic