Communications of the ACM
Tenure-O-Meter
"We don't intend for it to be used by academic departments as a single element of decisions. That would be a pretty bad thing," Indiana University Associate Professor of Computer of Informatics and Computer Science Filippo Menczer says of the Tenurometer.
Credit: Indiana University
Indiana University computer scientists have developed the Tenurometer, a tool for evaluating the impact of scholars in their field. Tenurometer counts the number of contributions to the literature and how frequently articles have been cited. Tenurometer uses the h-index, which combines the scholarly output with the influence of the work, but adds the universal h-index to measure how experts from other disciplinary backgrounds are impacted by the research.
"We have computer scientists, and physicists, and we have social scientists, and people from many different backgrounds, who publish in lots of different areas," says Indiana professor Filippo Menczer. However, the various communities have different citation methods and different publishing traditions, making it difficult to compare the influence of a sociologist and a computer scientist, for example. The universal h-index controls for differences in the publishing traditions, as well as the amount of research scholars in various fields have to produce to make an impact.
Menczer is especially excited about the potential to help show how the disciplines are merging into one another.
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