Walk softly and carry a large carrot: how to give credit for academic work

A poster to show how to give credit for academic work. Researchers want to know how their work impacts their communities, and the wider world; including research outputs other than peer-reviewed journal publications. The journal paper provides a way of claiming and defining an area of intellectual work, and citation of articles allows the acknowledgement of that work by others. Yet the paper can only give an overview of the work - it is not possible to publish everything into a paper that is needed to make it fully reproducible. For providing credit (and for making recruitment and promotion decisions) we abstract the paper further. Instead of reading every citing paper, we instead count the citations, reckoning this an appropriate proxy for the quality of the paper, and hence the described work. Citation counts for datasets are one of the “carrots” promised to researchers for their efforts in citing and publishing data, also producing a metric by which the quality of a dataset can be evaluated. Quality is a slippery concept when it comes to data, which can be good quality for one purpose, and bad for another. Measuring the impact of research directly is difficult, so we resort to measuring what we can (number of citations). Care must be taken with indirect measurements to ensure that they map appropriately to what we really want to measure.