Rational citation based incentives to maintain Panjab University H-Index rank(and rewards).

A message to colleagues that I think is applicable more generally.

Rational citation based incentives  to  maintain  Panjab University H-Index rank(and rewards).

Recently Hyderabad University, Panjab University,  Delhi University and Banaras Hindu University,  which rank as the top 4 Universities in the country with (SCOPUS)H-indices of 87, 85, 84, 78 respectively, were recognized  by  Department of Science and Technology of the Govt. of India and rewarded for this high H-index performance by the release of multi-crore PURSE grants.  In view of these developments it seems that  the obscurity shrouding  general understanding of the meaning of Citations, Impact Factors and other arcana of the Internet Publication Era is now liable to rapidly clear : since there is nothing quite like economic  self interest  to clear the mind ! This message is a contribution towards turning that inevitable processtowards rational policy and thus  a virtuous cycle .

   Three years ago I had strongly advocated that the use of Impact factor based incentives to reward faculty was absurd  (On the Absurdity of the use of Journal Impact factors as a measure of Individual Academic Excellence: http://chanaulakh.blogspot.in/2009/12/on-absurdity-of-use-of-journal-impact.html).  I argued that citation based incentives were much more likely to select faculty whose research would bring laurels and largesse to the University. Unfortunately no attention was paid  to my fulminations and the PURSE awards were used to hand out considerable amounts of discretionary spending money to reward individuals on the basis of  the utterly   meaningless concept of “Aggregate Impact Factor’’.   The absurdity of those awards is underlined by the fact that many  of the awardees do not figure at all   in the list of 85 papers which actually contributed to the University H-index of 85(see attached SCOPUS files), and conversely the authors actually on the H-index list received little if any recognition !  The persons rewarded were not even  selected  on the basis of their number of contributions   with more than, say, 50  citations: who could therefore rationally be expected to contribute to raising the University’s H-index and visibility. Instead,  based upon a complete misunderstanding of the meaning and significance of the very concepts of Journal Impact factors  and Citations,    PURSE monies were used to encourage not those with really outstanding research but instead those with other qualifications, connections or pretensions.  Now that all know that National authorities will base their recognition and  funding distribution  on the Citation achievements,  all stakeholders have a vital interest that the University sets up a reward system tuned to encourage real Citation achievements rather than irrelevant parameters such as the Impact Factors of journals published in. As  I had already argued in the cited blog and e-mail,  recognition on the basis of  Impact Factor of Journals  may actually   reward    individuals who lowered the IF of the journal they published in  if the citation count for the individual  publications is not   checked !  It is like rewarding someone for managing to drink tea at an exclusive club(measured by JIF) even if the result is that the club has to work twice as hard to clean up the mess he left behind !

 Since the bulk of the PURSE monies are shared among all the Science Departments and Science Faculty it is clear that such perverse policies are not only  unfair exploitation of the work of dedicated researchers but  also  damage the  entire University and Faculty in the long run. As I concluded earlier :

The UGC and university authorities should wake up to the developing absurdity that will soon entrench itself and become established wisdom that will entail another 50 years of academic mediocrity . They should  adopt numerical measures-- if at all they have the ability and self confidence to use numerical measures objectively and not a la Disraeli i.e as the evil third in ``lies , damn lies and statistics"-- that are in line with the best metrics available globally for measuring individual performance, and not further nourish the absurd  laurels for mediocrity  that are the bane of the quest for excellence in the Indian academic system.

I therefore propose that to encourage continued high rank of Panjab University(why not first ?!)  on the national H-index list the University should base its distribution of  special recognition funding (which is only a miniscule fraction of the total) from the PURSE grants released strictly on the basis  of  

1)   Contribution to the University H-index of 85 : those faculty and scholars whose papers figure on the list of 85 papers counted for the University H-Index should be recognized with special Research and Travel funding. When counting shared contributions of several faculty to the same paper   fractions may be used so that resources are not used up unfairly when say a paper on the list has, say,  10 co-authors from the University !

2)    Presence on the University’s top 200 by (SCOPUS)citation list(attached) /i60 list (i.e authors of those papers from the university which have more than 60 citations -this can be deduced from the attached list- but are not yet on the H-index=85  list) should  be considered for recognition, since it is a rational expectation that it is these authors/papers  who are likely to actually push the Panjab University H-index even higher next year or the next time the University’s H-index is evaluated by funding agencies.

Use of these criteria and a mathematical formula for proportionally distributing the earmarked funding on the basis of numerical scores associated with these criteria would go a long way in removing the  corrosive and counterproductive resentments felt by researchers when administrators select individuals for rewards in no sense commensurate with their achievements (not to speak of the later use of those very rewards as counters to garner yet more recognition : a perfect vicious cycle!). If these simple and rational measures are adopted  we may succeed in setting up a virtuous cycle by which each round of citation recognition funding (e.g PURSE) at the institutional level not only improves the facilities and funding for the University and Faculty as a whole but also  is sensibly and directly used to recognize and motivate those who will carry the University’s publication performance to new heights and thus to win it even more funding and recognition at the national level and so on.  Any other arbitrary system of rewards would  be more of  the  “kill  the golden goose” policies that bedevil our polity and academe. I appeal to the faculty to support the institution of a  fair and transparent  system  of research achievement recognition at the earliest.

  Charanjit S. Aulakh