After some conversation last night, I believe we have developed some good metrics for measuring a researcher's performance! ("Awesome," you say sarcastically, "another means by which my advisor can tell that I am slacking.") Okay, fine, it may not inspire too much self-confidence, hence the friends-lock, but it is at least fun to calculate!
Here are the two metrics:
Batting Average - Just like in baseball, your batting average is the ratio of accepted papers to submitted papers. I can't really think of the research equivalent of a walk, but I'm sure one of you can. Walks, of course, would not be factored in to batting average. Maybe we can leave that for on-base percentage. My batting average is .667, but this is mainly due to my not having submitted many papers at all. (6 submits, 4 accepts)
Slugging Percentage - Now this metric I believe to be much more illustrative. Just like slugging percentage in baseball, a researcher's slugging percentage is the number of accepted publications over submitted publications, weighted by strength of venue. One could imagine several orderings depending on how things are done in your field, but for now I will go with 1x for workshop papers, 2x for second-tier conferences and journal special issues, 3x for standard journal articles and 4x for first-tier conferences. Here, due to the relative poor quality of my publications, I don't do nearly as well. (2w.s. x 1 + 2s.t. x 2) / 6 = 1.000. Good for baseball maybe, but not particularly stunning in the research world.
What do you guys think? Am I opening a horrible horrible can of worms? Am I a bad person? Any other stats you'd like to see?
batting 1.000 -- i should just quit while i'm ahead!
ReplyDeleteA walk is probably something like my WMM submission, where the conference was just abstracts and my co-author was on the PC. Or a TR?
ReplyDeleteIgnoring the walk, I am batting .667 with a slugging percentage of 2.0. But I haven't submitted that many things.