CHARANJIT SINGH AULAKH'S BLOG
Why the web-page ? 29 November 2009
Well here I am, after prolonged resistance, also trying to be an active presence on the web. So why, after resisting for nearly 15 years, did I finally decide to put up a web page and start this Blog and do all the things that are such a routine part of generation NeXt ? Well maybe its only that I don't like to fall more than a technology wave or two behind the surging masses of the cyberalive .
Moreover there is much to be said for the view that all persons in a public positions -including University faculty who daily impinge upon the mental formation of coming generations of social elites- have an obligation to make available the facts concerning their academic performance for the benefit of informed choice by students and the public seeking connection with the University system.
However what actually finally pushed me to make the effort and overcome my rather archaic distaste for self publicity was a rather tendentious, even meretricious, article by Neha Miglani, a reporter for the The Tribune, a newspaper based in Chandigarh, India where I work . The article is objectionable to several faculty in my University because it gives a partial, distorted, even laughable account of the citation status of Panjab University faculty. From the omissions and inclusions it seems designed to serve the end of promoting as stupendous achievements what are, to any informed person, rather routine and mundane levels of citational visibility. Unfortunately, possibly in order to perform meretricious services, the reporter omits all mention of several faculty members in the Physics Department(and possibly others elsewhere) whose citations are much higher than those artificially elevated (by this omission ) to the top of the list actually published. In itself this might have been ascribed to a minor lack of diligence on the part of the reporter. However, quite in keeping with the traditional hauteur of the print media - especially amplified in India by their cozy and well oiled nexus with the fonts of power - not only did the Editor of the Tribune refuse to even acknowledge an email from me, but even a joint statement by three senior Professors and a very well cited Reader at my university , and a further open letter (with the same content and four authors ) to the Tribune ``Letters to the Editor'' elicited absolutely no acknowledgment. Thus they made clear that there would be no attempt at rectifying the misleading and tendentious article which by its omissions had obviously unjustifiedly impacted perceptions of our academic status in the community. Now all this will come as no surprise to world weary and cynical academics and the general public, at least in India. Indeed the reaction for as long as one can remember would always be ``I told you its no use protesting ....''.
However many things that were seeming permanent absolutes-such as the power and invulnerability of the Newspaper media- have begun begun to wobble in the Internet age. The Internet offers a recourse against oppression by the print media, to those who for all too long would have had none. Therefore to make a modest contribution to the struggle against the insensitivity of the established local media to any questioning of the dubious authenticity of their publications, I decided to put on record my basic academic data on my webpage along with a link to the article. This is in the hope that this will begin to take the discussion beyond just establishing what are the correct raw citation data (which right now are imagined to be easily falsifiable by the likes of Neha Miglani !) . I hope this will aid more informed discussion locally and perhaps even in India generally , of issues concerning academic performance and its objective rating using the slew of quantitative citation indices that have been developed. The need to improve the quality of academic and research performance in India is a perpetual occasion for moaning, hand wringing and Crocodile Tears generally, by all concerned, but almost no effective steps are ever actually taken because it would imply noting too many inconvenient facts and implementing incommodius reforms , not to speak of treading of various naked toes! . It may also contribute a little to discourage the blatant perversion of facts often indulged in by local media, for dubious local motives, secure in the knowledge that affected (localized) individuals are simply incapable of dispersing the distorted images and facts propagated by such local journalists and "sources '' with ulterior motives.
Issues concerning the value of the manifold new forms of quantitaive ranking of academic performance are ever more to the forefront of academic attention these days. In my specialization (Theoretical High Energy Physics) we have a long established and very complete Bibliographic and Citation research service called HEP-SPIRES that is openly accessible and free of charge . Unfortunately the other services available like SCOPUS , and Web of Science are paid for and hence hard to access for the general public. Various measures including the famous H-index (1995) and the latest Phys author rank based on the Google Page Rank algorithm have caught the attention and imagination of many in the academic community and the percolation of these measures, which can be seen as part of the List-making frenzy prevalent on the Internet generally, is an important instance of new modes of social interaction that have arisen due to the advent of the internet. We scientists are only human, all too human, and all too ready to agonize on our place in the scheme of things. I hope to write an article explaining these issues to beginners so this is as good a place as any to start putting down the relevant arguments. Readers are welcome to comment and weigh in for or against any particular method or for all .
The hope is also that I may use this Blog from time to time to express my musings on diverse subjects : as one grows long in tooth one feels the need to ramble on, but a live audience is always harder and harder to corall. So you, dear clickers, will be my not-so-captive ears if and when I have something to say : hopefully it will not always be a rant about injustices done to me personally!
