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Funding agencies, journal editors, and hiring and promotion committees expend large amounts of time and resources deciding how to allocate precious funds, what science to publish, and which scientists deserve a job or promotion because of their scientific contributions.Now imagine an automated information system that can make this process much more efficient.Every academic researcher in the world is ranked based on a productivity index.Let us call it the Metric for Evaluation of Scientific Scholarship (MESS).This system works with an algorithm that tabulates the number of grants awarded to a researcher, the award amount for each grant, the number of publications authored, and the number of times those publications were downloaded and cited.In addition, the MESS would include a variable reflecting the prestige of the journals in which a researcher's work was published.The MESS would be adopted to rank all researchers in the world, providing the basis for hiring, funding, and promotion decisions.And no need for a Nobel Prize selection committee, either!We have the MESS.The MESS algorithm would be undisclosed proprietary information, but the MESS rankings would be available to anyone willing to pay a fee for access to this means of ranking researchers.Such a frightening system might have a few minor flaws, like favoring senior investigators and researchers in fields with more funding and more publications and replacing the quest for deeper understanding with a quest for a higher MESS.As absurd as this imaginary system might seem, sadly, the research community often relies on a system that is almost as absurd as this
Bertuzzi et al. (Wed,) studied this question.