引文索引的使用和滥用

Citation Indexes:Uses and Misuses

在科学主义和数据主义浪潮的推动下,数据化管理被先后用于企业、政府治理,以及学术管理和评估。在此过程中,"科学引文索引网络"(WoS)的引文索引在其行业中占有近乎垄断的地位——在有的国家和地区,它受到新兴起的Scopus的挑战,但后者与之基本是同一性质的,也是主要凭借引文数据来评估学刊的营利性业务。它原先的尝试性概括被逐步建构为绝对的"定律",并被严格实施,先被用于自然科学领域,而后被扩大到社会科学领域,最后还被用于艺术与人文领域。如今,它涵盖了人类知识的整个连续体,从最高度普世的自然科学到比较特殊的社会科学,再到至为特殊的艺术与人文领域。这种评估方法实际上越来越与学术的实际和真旨相悖,亟需改革。

Under the tidal waves of scientism and data-ism,first in business management and governance,and then also in scholarly research,the Web of Science citation indexes have been carried to near-monopolistic control of the business of journals evaluation in the U.S.(though increasingly challenged in some areas by the more recent but similar Scopus citation indexes.)With that dominance,earlier tentative generalizations based on limited research gradually became more and more rigidified"laws"that have been strictly enforced. Those"laws"came to be applied first to the natural sciences,then extended to the social sciences,and finally also to major spheres of the arts and humanities. Today,they have come to dominate the entire continuum of disciplines and fields ranging from the most universalist of the natural sciences,in which truths may be established by reproducible experiments,to the more particularist social sciences,and still more particularist arts and humanities,in which theories,even"facts,"are far more contested and tentative. As we move across the spectrum from the more universalist end of natural sciences toward the more particularist end of the social sciences and arts and humanities,such methods have tended to violate ever more the fundamental nature and realities of scholarly research. It urgently needs to be reformed.