Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • WORLD VIEW

Stop misusing data when hiring academics

Social-media impact, university rankings and online-aggregator metrics are broken — better ways to assess researchers are needed.
By
  1. Cameron Neylon

    1. Cameron Neylon is professor of research communications at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and co-lead of the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative.

Look me up in InCites -— a tool made by US research-analytics company Clarivate — and you’ll find a biochemist who hasn’t published all that much recently. Google Scholar, Google’s tool for searching academic publications, shows more of my work in the past few years on research evaluation and open research. Like everyone else, I prefer the larger numbers — and Google Scholar provides them — but they come with more errors, owing to how Google’s algorithms crawl and index author lists. My problems are relatively minor; one colleague has tens of citations according to InCites, and tens of thousands according to scrapers such as Google Scholar.

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Prices vary by article type

from$1.95

to$39.95

Learn more

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Nature 607, 637 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-02038-7

Competing Interests

C.N. is the co-lead of the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI), which builds and advocates for the provision of community-controlled data and analytics to support research evaluation, policy making and strategy. COKI has received funding from Curtin University, the Mellon Foundation in New York City and Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, in London. No funders had any role in the preparation of this manuscript.

Subjects

Latest on:

Nature Careers

Jobs

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing

Search

Advanced search

Quick links