Re: For Sandy Thatcher: A Sample of Copy-Editing

[Sandy Thatcher <sandy.thatcher@alumni.princeton.edu>]

Granting Stevan's hypothesis for the moment, let me ask this 
further question: how does posting a paper as poorly written as 
this enhance a university's reputation, which has been touted as 
one of the advantages to accrue from Green OA?

Sandy Thatcher


At 5:54 PM -0400 8/23/10, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>Preamble:
>
>(1) I care about the quality of published English (or any 
>language) as much as does Sandy Thatcher, who copy edited for 
>years for Princeton University Press: I edited for years for 
>Cambridge University Press.
>
>(2) Hence I find the example below as appalling as Sandy no 
>doubt will.
>
>(3) But I think I am more realistic than Sandy on two scores: 
>(3a) the appallingly low level of journal article copy-editing 
>today and (even more important) (3b) the fact that the low 
>quality of journal article writing does not matter to the 
>progress of scientific and scholarly progress anywhere near as 
>much the low level of access to journal articles.
>
>So read the abstract below, and ask yourself whether, despite 
>the affront to your sense of grammar, style and standards, there 
>was anything of substance you missed, despite the faulty form.
>
>And consider that those potential users who are at an 
>institution without a subscription to this journal would not 
>have access to the substance of the underlying full-text at all.
>
>(This is without prejudice about the content of this article's 
>full-text -- about yet another unvalidated, a-priori metric 
>algorithm -- which I have not read!)
>
>Source: http://bit.ly/JinfoCopyEditing
>
>Abstract
>
>This paper introduces a new impact indicator for the research 
>effort of a university, nh3. The number of documents or the 
>number of citations obtained by an institution are used 
>frequently in international ranking of institutions. However, 
>these are very dependent on the size and this is inducing 
>mergers with the apparent sole goal of improving the research 
>ranking. The alternative is to use the ratio of the two 
>measures, the mean citation rate, that is size independent but 
>it has been shown to fluctuate along the time as a consequence 
>of its dependence on a very small number of documents with an 
>extremely good citation performance. In the last few years, the 
>popularity of the Hirsch index as an indicator of the research 
>performance of individual researchers led to its application to 
>journals and institutions.
>
>However, the original aim of this h index of giving a mixed 
>measure of the number of documents published and their impact as 
>measured by the citations collected along the time is totally 
>undesirable for institutions as the overall size may be 
>considered irrelevant for the impact evaluation of research. 
>Furthermore, the h index when applied to institutions tends to 
>retain a very small number of documents making all other 
>research production irrelevant for this indicator. The nh3 index 
>proposed here is designed to measure solely the impact of 
>research in a way that is independent of the size of the 
>institution and is made relatively stable by making a 20-year 
>estimate of the citations of the documents produced in a single 
>year.
>
>Copyright 2010 Published by Elsevier B.V.