Academia as a d-index measuring contest
kevinmunger.substack.com28 points by surprisetalk 6 days ago
28 points by surprisetalk 6 days ago
Regarding "research.com", which is linked from the article: this is weird - some random observations...:
• Donald E. Knuth, the most eminent computer scientist alive, ranked 92nd (!) in computer science - seems off by about two orders of magnitde.
• Noam A. Chomsky, of whom some say he is the most-cited scholar alive (on the level of Aristotle), ranked seventh in the US. He gave theoretical computer science the Chomsky hierarchy and the Chomsky Normal Form, he has been called the "father of modern linguistics" (Hewbrew morphology, generative grammars, competence-performance distinction, Universal grammar, government & binding theory, the review of Skinner's book that single-handedly destroyed behaviorism, the 'minimalist' program, ...), in politology he is a long-standing and perhaps the most ardent and vocal critic of US foreign policy, supporter of Palestine (being a Jew himself), and in communications and media studies his book (with Herman) "manufactoring Consent" is a field-defining classic. - https://research.com/u/noam-chomsky
• regarding school rankings, in Germany, KIT (Karlsruhe Inst. of Technology) seems missing entirely, a top place in CS research.
Interesting article and methodology. I wish you could play with the ranking features to see how the ranking evolves.
I didn't know Kevin Munger. You could definitely seen regarding his field and publications why he would weight 25% of the score to the methodology citations though. Which is partly why his index is very flawed, seeing how qualitative endeavors would be squashed (Qualitative methodologies being very dependant on context). Maybe it does bridge a gap between disciplines that are quantitatively oriented ; STEM and social sciences. The humanities would be nowhere though.
It does beg the question of rankings to begin with ... A dean should know better than to statsmaxx (note the irony).
I thought it was fairly obvious the author was trying to point out the issue with quantitative rankings by setting up the stats to juice his score. It would be fun to play with the stats and figure out how to make yourself come out on top though. Unfortunately I'm not in political science, so it's not much good to me.
It’s the l33t code of academia.