Another World is Possible: Expanding the Imaginary of Scholarly Metrics

Abstract

Elsevier, the world’s largest scholarly publisher, now describes itself as an “information analytics business”. While this rebranding may strike librarians as an Orwellian turn, it is also a sign of the prestige and attractiveness that metrics and analytics possess, both to the investor class and in the dean’s suite. The market for scholarly metrics is growing, and it is not hard to imagine a near future where vendor-supplied data on the impact of scholarship holds ever more influence over the decisions and priorities of academic institutions. But scholarly metrics are deeply flawed. They are rarely valid across disciplines or even sub-disciplines, they are easily and frequently gamed, they recreate entrenched biases, and they deeply influence the form and content of the scholarship they are intended to measure. Embedding these metrics more deeply into discovery tools and workflows will only deepen the distortions they produce in the process of scholarly communication.