https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1751157725001269#sec0001
Still following my previous letter published in the Journal of Informetrics (linked above), in which I challenged J. Gorraiz’s critical framing of bibliometrics and argued for a more empirically grounded assessment of their value, it is worth drawing attention to a paper published in Research Evaluation by researchers from Utrecht University, Tilburg University, and RWTH Aachen University, entitled “Towards a more informed and balanced use of scientific performance metrics.” Its message is refreshingly at odds with the increasingly fashionable campaign to portray bibliometric indicators as intellectually suspect or ethically undesirable. The authors argue that, when properly used and correctly interpreted, metrics can provide a rational, transparent and evidence-based starting point for evaluating researchers, provided they are complemented by qualitative assessment. The real question is therefore not whether metrics are imperfect of course they are but whether replacing imperfect evidence with substantially more subjective judgement constitutes progress at all.
This is precisely where the enthusiasm for narrative CVs becomes much harder to defend. Narratives may provide context, but they also create an extraordinarily fertile environment for selective self-presentation, rhetorical embellishment, strategic omission and academic self-marketing. Once measurable evidence is pushed into the background, the evaluation process risks rewarding not those who have produced the strongest scientific record, but those who are most skilled at writing themselves into excellence. In that sense, the supposed escape from bibliometric bias may simply replace visible and contestable imperfections with biases that are less measurable, less transparent and far more dependent on the preferences of individual evaluators. A system that claims to reduce arbitrariness by removing objective evidence may, paradoxically, be constructing ideal conditions for arbitrariness to flourish.
The intellectually serious position is therefore neither blind worship of metrics nor their fashionable demonization, but their intelligent combination with rigorous qualitative judgement. Metrics can be normalized, scrutinized, challenged and independently verified; narratives and panel impressions are far more difficult to audit. Removing metrics does not remove bias from research assessment it removes one of the few elements capable of constraining it. If universities and funding agencies then fill that evidential vacuum with persuasive narratives and largely discretionary panel judgements, they should at least have the courage to acknowledge what they are doing: not necessarily creating a fairer system, but potentially replacing imperfect measurement with a more elegant, less visible and institutionally legitimized form of subjectivity disguised as principled academic fairness.
PS - One important advantage of bibliometrics that is not explicitly addressed by the authors deserves particular attention: its capacity to act as an external check on local academic power. The paper rightly recognizes the danger of committee subjectivity and argues that evaluators should explain discrepancies between their judgements and quantitative indicators. But it does not fully develop the broader institutional implication. Recruitment and promotion decisions may rest in the hands of a small group of academics embedded in particular hierarchies, networks and institutional cultures, whereas bibliometric evidence is generated largely outside that room, through the recognition of research by scientists across institutions and countries.This matters especially in deeply academically inbred systems dominated by internal reproduction and institutionally entrenched local patronage, where recruitment and promotion remain heavily shaped by entrenched institutional networks. Such systems have, even within Europe, produced full professors with negligible research output or citation records astonishingly difficult to reconcile with any serious notion of internationally recognized scientific impact. In such cases, metrics do something profoundly politically inconvenient, they expose the disjunction between locally manufactured academic status and externally visible scientific influence. They may not stop a committee from rewarding mediocrity, but they make it much harder to disguise that mediocrity as excellence.
