As someone who retired eight years ago I have been managing the transition to the complete lack of relevance of my CV. Ok, I still publish stuff and I keep an updated note on my website of my publications (www.grahamscambler.com), but I appreciate that these are no longer a matter of institutional significance or consequence. Why do I still publish? Three reasons I think: first, I have a few things I find I want to communicate (though I ought to decline more invitations to do review or summary pieces, which tend to cover well-trodden territory); second, I have a sense that publishing, not least in peer-review journals, lends credibility to one of my alternate outlets, blogging; and third, I can’t seem to stop.
It is clear that statistics and matrices are becoming more and more salient for colleagues still in employment (leading some indeed to refer to the ‘matrix society’). Like many in sociology and elsewhere I see this as a form of Weberian bureaucratisation or ‘juridification (not unrelated also to Marxian processes of ‘neoliberal’ commodification and alienation). I abhor university and subject ranking tables, which I see as both intrinsically questionable and extrinsically damaging. They are extrinsically problematic in part because they accent competition and in part because they offer management a device for controlling – and taming – academic employees. It seems university senior management teams are unwilling to refuse to ‘play the game’. If they did collectively refuse, then time would necessarily be called on ‘the game’. But this is an enduring sociological problematic: how to get people to act collectively. As things stand, ‘the game’ must be played to the final whistle.
Anyway, this blog is focused on another kind of – individual – metric, which I have just encountered. I was a fortunate babyboomer who escaped much sharp-tooled institutional surveillance by retiring in 2013. I always operated under the innocent assumption that what matters is not metrically-proven productivity – the amount of research revenue generated and the number of publications in high-impact journals – but the value of the research conducted wherever disseminated.
Out of interest I checked out ‘google scholar’ and signed up. What did I discover? Well, I have metrics of my very own. Two seem to be key, both entirely new to me. I appreciate that any colleagues who read this will be grinning to themselves, but I’d best be clear. The h-index apparently refers to the number of publications for which an author is cited by another author at least that same number of times (eg an h-index of 17 means that the author has published at least 17 papers each cited 17 times). I’m informed that an h-index of 20 is ‘good’, 40 no less than ‘great’, and 60 ‘remarkable’.
The i10-index is the second one of some import, as I understand it. It is simpler: it refers to the number of publications with at least 10 citations.
My h-index, I am informed, is 45 (so, ‘great’) and my i10-index was 96.
I then had a swift look at the ‘scores’ of some of my peers, and I was duly humbled.
I have a number of observations, the first of which is that I may have suffered from my babyboomership (now there’s a novel thought). I simply paid no attention throughout the entirety of my career to the institutional ramifications of what I published where.
This reminds me of the circumstances on my promotion to professor at UCL, and my subsequent allocation to the ‘appropriate’ professorial ‘band’. While I was top-rated as an academic researcher, I found I was less satisfactorily graded on a batch of criteria – like public engagement – that had simply not been relevant during my career to that point. It was like being retrospectively punished!
Back to the h-index and the i10-index. On the face of it these seem reasonable indicators of something like ‘impact’. But I looked at my ‘top’ four cited publications on the h-index. The first was my paper introducing the concepts of felt and enacted stigma (966 citations); second was a much more recent review paper on health-related stigma (635 citations); third a multi-authored paper on culture and health (549 citations); and fourth a short paper on stigma and disease (396 publications). On reflection only the first of these is of much significance: it was, I think, an empirically based and conceptually innovative sociological paper. The second was ‘just’ a summary of the extant literature (even if I got decent feedback on it). And the third and fourth – wait for it – were papers published in The Lancet. So my ‘higher scores’ were apparently in part a function of: (i) publishing a review paper that others were particularly likely to reference, and (ii) publishing short and rather insignificant papers in a well-recognised, high-impact journal outside my own discipline. From scanning others’ high scores on the two indices it was clear that a person’s career could be given a boost by decisions to publish meta-analyses, reviews, methods papers and health-services research in high-impact (ie medical) journals. Well ok, but I’m glad I’m out of it.
I should add here that a number of my peers whose scores I briefly scrutinised have done deeply impressive work. Metrics might be intrinsically and extrinsically questionable, but this is not to deny that many high scores reflect outstanding scholarship.
But I’m still glad I’m out of it.
I close with a few observations that afford hope to those of us apparently without stellar scores. One day the whistle might indeed by blown on games presently being played (contested); and it is quite possible that a publication neglected – even overlooked – by our consociates will ‘take off’ when we are long gone! Then there are other outlets. I have been blogging since my retirement, and have somehow accumulated 384 blogs on my website. I regard blogs as thinking out loud in the hope such thoughts might be of interest to others. Many of my blogs are ‘academic’. There are those pushing for these other ways of disseminating ideas – I have somehow chalked up nearly 280,000 views on my website – to be taken as serious outputs. We shall see.