International Symposium - Bibliometrics - 2013#

Event Location: Wenner Gren Centre, Stockholm
Event date: May 23 - May 25, 2013

"Bibliometrics: Use and Abuse in the Review of Research Performance" - an international symposium - open to all.

Members and non-members of the Academy are invited to participate in an international symposium that will address one of the most important issues that impacts on the professional University level academic.

The event is sponsored by the Wenner Gren Foundations and is part of the continuing series of symposia organised by the Academia Europaea group "HERCulES" [Higher Education, Research and Culture in European Societies]

Background for the symposium #

"We are deeply convinced that human ingenuity and creativity are beyond all conceivable quantitative measure. […] The present hype of bibliometry made it plainly obvious that judging the quality of science publications and science projects by bibliometric measures alone is inadequate. […] Start reading papers instead of merely rating them by counting citations!"

Richard R. Ernst, ‘The Follies of Citation Indices and Academic Ranking Lists’, CHIMIA 64 (2010) 90.

When a Nobel Prize Laureate uses such strong language, the scientific community and science policy makers should pay attention. While private companies, publishing houses, consultancies and the boards of scientific institutions are organizing perpetuum mobiles of evaluations, the scientific community gets increasingly impatient with the heavy burden this whole evaluation carousel puts on their shoulders. While the investment in working time and money is evident, the effects are all but transparent and the methodological controversies are far from solved. The main objection surely is the reduction of evaluation to sheer metrics, as a proxy to the desire for a standardized evaluation of a great variety of achievements.

In 2011, the AE and the Wenner-Gren Foundations organized a symposium on ‘The role of trust in higher education’, in which ‘the increasing call for accountability’ was one of the four themes. The present proposal for a symposium delves further into the culture of accountability, and the techniques to establish indicators of quality on various levels, from the individual research paper to whole universities.......contd. in the programme document

Convenor:

Wim Blockmans, Leiden

Organising Committee:

Erik De Corte, Leuven (Chair of the AE 'HERCuLES' group)
Lars Engwall, Uppsala
Jan Reedijk, Leiden
Denis Weaire, Dublin
Wenner Gren Foundation representative: Professor Bertil Daneholt

Symposion Information#

• Download the detailed programm
• Advance registration is compulsory (no registration fee). Clickto register.
• Delegates will be responsible for making their own hotel reservations and travel arrangements. However, we have a list of recommended hotels that are near to the Wenner gren Center.

Contact at the Academia Europaea: Teresa McGovern (admin@acadeuro.org)
Local Wenner Gren contact: Maria Helgostam (maria.helgostam@swgc.org)
Map link for the Wenner Gren centre
Link to the Wenner gren Foundations

Proceedings:

Proceedings of the symposium will be published and all participants will receive a gratis copy of the volume.

All the past series of 'HERCuLES' group publications