quinta-feira, 26 de novembro de 2020

Why is Clarivate Analytics favouring certain scientific fields and descriminating all the others ?


Clarivate Analytics just disclosed its list of Highly Cited Researchers and, again, many highly cited researchers do not appear on it just because the methodology used by Clarivate Analytics favours a few (magic) scientific fields and discriminates all the other fields. In 2018 Clarivate tried to correct the problem by creating a new multidisciplinary category (Cross-Field) still that does not solve the problem at all. For instance, it does not make any sense whatsoever to put all social sciences under the same indicator in the same way that it's unscientific to put all engineering disciplines under the same "umbrella" because each has its own citation patterns. For instance, biological engineering has much higher citation records than civil engineering. At least Clarivate Analytics should have used the same 54 fields already used by Shanghai Ranking. 

PS - In order to overcome the many shortcomings of the Clarivate Analytics scientists list back in 2019 several researchers from Stanford University designed a composite indicator with six components including the coauthorship-adjusted Schreiber hm-index for fractionalised counting of papers https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000384 which is now known as the Stanford Ranking being much more accurate in giving credit to highly cited scientists than the flawed Clarivate Analytics scientists list.