Ranking of Bioinforticians
Gajendra P.S. Raghava
Saturday, 08 August 2009 19:38 UTC
I came to across a site Bioinformatics Lab Registry . They claim, they have ranked nearly 99% of all bioinformatics laboratories. They ranked all labs based upon the citation rating of the papers of the principal investigator. I was interested to know from this community about validity of ranking. I mean ranking of scientist claim in this site is acceptable to community. If answer is yes then this will be good resource to check contribution of a bioinformatician.
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Replies
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At least the managed to rank themselves first as bioinformatics website with the most advertisement!
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Somehow, I’m not impressed.
While it’s useful to be able to ask what has been done in the last year, I think it’s more important to ask what the contribution is per capita in a lab. Why should you compare the “Score” of a lab with 50 people to one that has 5?
At any rate, the “lifetime contribution” of a bioinformatician will depend on many other factors: how many people have passed through the lab as grad students, how many post-docs have been trained there, the shifting nature of impact factors in the journals they’ve published in – and how long the lab has been operating. I’m even more surprised that there’s no field of research provided (People publishing in hot topics get the higher impact factors, regardless of the quality of the research being done.) Without taking those additional factors into account, the rankings provide no useful information whatsoever.
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Well, I quickly browsed the website, and successfully found that I am in the 1%. The website is not that so useful, because the most of bioinformaticians knew these BIG names from text books several years ago. It’s not great helpful to know them again in the website. Again, the large number of labs lead by young PIs were omitted, because they should be in the 1%.
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Its not clear to me how they calculate score. I have seen papers and scores, some papers have high score where other have lower score. Its not clear on what base they calculate score of a paper certainly it is not based citation or impact factor of journal, because one of my recent paper in low impact factor journal with no citation have higher score than my another paper in high impact factor journal and heavy citation. In science its difficult to compare two scientists as performance of scientist depend on number of factor including size of groups, grant, salary of working hands etc. despite all these facts we should have some way to quantitate, problem is what is best measure. Presently we have too many measures to evaluate a scientist like h-index, g-index main based on citations
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Hello All
After having a quick visit to the web site, I would like to say, I did not agree with their method of ranking. There are number of good laboratories (say for eg UCSC) which are not ranked acordingly. Moreover one can not examine the contribution of bioinformaticians just be calculating the number of papers and citation. I agreed with Anthony, we should count the number of persons and should calculate the graph with respect to time as well. If a lab working from past 10 years published 100 papers and another working from past 5 yaers published 70 then which one is better?? moreover only number of publication is not a indication of contribution. So this kind of ranking method can not evaluate bioinformaticians contribution in a proper way. Infact there are several problems with H Index and I Index ranking as well. -
In addition to the issue of how to rank labs, I also see a big problem with respect to how they define a “bioinformatics lab”. I am pretty sure that Matthias Mann (#5 on the list) would be surprised to find his lab classified as such.
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This discussion raise a old but very important issue, “how to evaluate a person or lab”. In all awards or recognition or member of society or grant , one need to select the best person among list of good researchers. Most of the time researchers are not happy with selection committee, so it is important to have some critera to evaluate a researchers. I wants to know opinion of users of this thread on “critera of evaluation”.
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