Measure Quality

The BBC's Pallab Ghosh says that what journal you publish in has becoming increasingly important. Now, he says, grants go "almost exclusively to researchers who have published in a handful of top scientific journals." Peter Lawrence, an emeritus professor at the University of Cambridge, tells Ghosh that getting a grant "was never a very accurate process in the past. But it was done by people reading the [research] papers and determining whether it contained sparks of originality and quality of rigor and argument." Now, Lawrence says, it is determined by how prestigious the journals you publish in are and what your citation numbers are — that, he says, only shows how fashionable and well-funded a field is. Instead, Lawrence advocates a return to past and judging a proposal on its own merits.