Numbers that matter too much

WE live in a culture that values and ranks everything, including academics, on numbers. In this era of rankings, the “quality” of a professor is judged based on a series of numbers: research articles published, citations received, research grants awarded, PhD students supervised and h-index among others.

I generally agree with other authors who have written to this column over the unreasonable amount of pressure to publish. About 20 or 30 years ago, there were not many local professors who bothered about publication in international peer review journals.