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Showing posts from January, 2006

A Network-Based Scientific Evaluation Approach

Here is a scheme that requires little beyond some formalization, thinking, and Google Scholar or similar technology. With the internet, anybody can publish anything. Whether anybody else is actually going to read it is another question entirely (but so is the case for a large number of scientific publications). So any researcher is free to publish papers, reports, articles that are readily available to the scientific community at large. In a scheme reminiscent of the good old time of personal correspondences, each researcher should then convince other researchers to read their reports and comment on them, write about them, reference them in their own writings. This solves the question of the number of publications: do not limit it, encourage proliferation (it is very low cost). If something is really good, it will gain acceptance through readership and references. This is the model followed by Blogs, and it also abolishes the somewhat artificial boundaries delimiting "fields.&quo