Critics have argued that overreliance on scientometrics has created a system of perverse incentives, producing a publish or perish environment that leads to low-quality research.
The latter created the Science Citation Index[1] and founded the Institute for Scientific Information which is heavily used for scientometric analysis.
The industrialization of science increased the number of publications and research outcomes and the rise of the computers allowed effective analysis of this data.
As the investments in scientific research were included as part of the U.S. American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), a major economic stimulus package, programs like STAR METRICS were set up to assess if the positive impact on the economy would actually occur.
However, new algorithmic methods in search, machine learning and data mining are showing that is not the case for many information retrieval and extraction-based problems.
Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar) which fail to index thousands of studies in small journals and underdeveloped countries.
[21][22][23][24] The larger version (Science Citation Index Expanded) covers more than 8,500 notable and significant journals, across 150 disciplines, from 1900 to the present.
Although altmetrics are often thought of as metrics about articles, they can be applied to people, journals, books, data sets, presentations, videos, source code repositories, web pages, etc.
[35] Altmetrics could be applied to research filter,[35] promotion and tenure dossiers, grant applications[40][41] and for ranking newly published articles in academic search engines.
[42] Critics have argued that overreliance on scientometrics has created a publish or perish environment with perverse incentives that lead to low-quality research.