flynn002

Most academics loathe metrics. I’ve seldom attracted so much criticism as for my suggestion that a citation-based metric might be used to allocate funding to university departments. This suggestion was recycled this week in the Times Higher Education , after a group of researchers published predictions of REF2014 results based on departmental H-indices for four subjects. Twitter was appalled. Philip Moriarty, in a much-retweeted plea said: “Ugh. *Please* stop giving credence to simplistic metrics like the h-index. V. damaging”. David Colquhoun, with whom I agree on many things, responded like an exorcist confronted with the spawn of the devil, arguing that any use of metrics would just encourage universities to pressurise staff to increase their H-indices. Now, as I’ve explained before, I don’t particularly like metrics. In fact, my latest proposal is to drop both REF and metrics and simply award funding on the basis of the number of research-active people in a department.  But ...