Editors' note: bibliometrics and the curators of orthodoxy

Have you ever seen the Citation Indexes (CIs) for the year 1600? At that time, a very active community was working on the reconstruction of planetary movements by means of epicycles. In principle, any ellipse around the Sun may be approximated by sufficiently many epicycles around the Earth. This is a non-trivial geometrical task, especially given the lack of analytical tools (sums of series). And the books and papers of many talented geometers quoted one another. Scientific knowledge, however, was already taking other directions. Science has a certain 'inertia', it is prudent (at times, it has been exceedingly so, mostly for political or metaphysical reasons), but even under the best of conditions, we all know how difficult it is to accept new ideas, to let them blossom in time, away from short-term pressures. At best, CIs transform this slowness into a tool for judgement. If used unwisely, as is increasingly the case, they discourage people (young ones in particular) right from the outset from daring to think, from exploring new paths: how is it possible to find a job today in the field of science or to get tenure without the inertial consensus of the majority, of the largest research areas, imposed by CIs? So the avalanche effect inhibits or even eliminates variety, which is at the core of culture and science. And the preventive effect against novelty is what we particularly fear. At Ecole Normale Supérieure, in Paris, the departments of Mathematics, of Physics, and of Computer Science have expressed their firm opposition to the increasing use of CIs as a tool for scientific evaluation, or for characterising scientific laboratories. Note that eight out of the nine Fields Medals obtained in France have been given to former students and/or teachers from this Mathematics department (Grothendieck is the exception: outliers are always to be expected). The Physics department counts two Nobel Awards and has an extraordinary scientific history. In areas that are familiar to the readers of this journal, as well as in many other fields, the relatively young Computer Science department, which originated from the Mathematics department, has an impressive record. We join our colleagues in this institution, as we all believe that the use of CIs, as a spreading international phenomenon, is one step further away from a balanced mix between a 'culture of knowledge' and a 'culture of results' towards a pure culture of results: in the …