In many sciences, I think the “impact factor” could be sufficiently refined to give individuals a sense of how important or insightful individual contributions have been. OF course, Galison’s work in the history of science might lead us to question the indispensability of any particular person there!

In the humanities, it’s much harder to distinguish “good” from “bad” work, especially because a) a lot of the best work bridges disciplinary boundaries, b) sharpening our sense of division and conflict about values is often just as important as reaching consensus on some “truth”, and c) a lot has an aesthetic dimension, and de gustibus non est disputandum.

The question for the legal academy is whether it will permit a healthy pluralism of scientific (perhaps scientistic) research paradigms and more humanistic approaches (including ELS, law & ec, law & humanities, doctrinal scholarship, postdisciplinary interventions, etc.) OR will so condition prestige and recognition on things like SSRN downloads, research grants, and quantification that only scholars who model our social science on the natural sciences will be thought of as important or worth reading.

So is your main concern (a) the desire to rank, (b) the desire to to quantify value, (c) the reliance on poor proxies, or (d) all of the above. I suspect (d), but wonder whether any one of the three is more alarming or whether it depends on the context. With respect to the DHS algorithm, it obviously makes sense to prioritize and allocate funds according to each state’s risk/need, a component of which would include the number of expected targets, but the algorithm was flawed — a poor proxy, shallow measurement, etc. In your view, is the problem in academia the need to rank or the use of poor proxies?

(Sorry for the delayed comment; I’ve been offline for a week. Thanks for the many excellent posts!)

Brett