#Diagnosis #Associate #Professor #Tuleja #Minister #Tuleja
Results speak for athletes. That is why we can also compare their performance well. For example, tennis players have rankings. Based on the points they have received for their performance over the past twelve months, their ranking is updated weekly.
What ranking points are for tennis players, the quality of their publications is for scientists. But the question that cannot be answered is how to assess it objectively.
The most crude criterion of scientific work is the number of published scientific articles. But it may not have anything to do with the quality of the zhola, which is why the scientific world looks at this criterion with great disdain. What we want much more is quality. However, it is not easily objectively measurable. And so we rely on the fact that the most cited journals, which are also those with the most international prestige, have very strict criteria regarding the selection of published articles.
When an article is accepted into a good professional journal, it happens that several renowned experts unknown to the author are asked by the editors to first assess the quality of the text offered. This process is called a review. For example, in my field, approximately one out of ten to one out of twenty-five articles received by the editors end up in the world’s best journals.
It follows that publishing a scientific work in a really high-quality journal is always a great success. Well, those texts that do not get into top magazines, or at least good ones, are usually sent by the authors to worse or even “predatory” magazines.
So-called predatory journals are, shall we say, much less rigorous in their review process. This allows authors to publish almost anything, for which they get paid at the same time (in the order of units to tens of thousands of crowns). The main principle of their success is precisely bypassing the review process. And some scientists resorted to this system because they simply needed publications to advance their careers.
For at least the past ten years, the topic of predatory journals has been taken very seriously in the scientific community. And the one who has ever engaged with them has a considerable reputational shell. At the same time, however, some really top scientists have published in them in the past. Mostly it happened to them by inadvertently sending an article to a journal that later turned out to be predatory.
However, a completely different situation arose with the short-term candidate for the post of Minister of Science, associate professor Pavel Tuleja. The social network for scientists ResearchGate (contains data on 25 million scientists) rates Tulej’s publications as moderately interesting. It is located exactly in the middle of the evaluated, at the fiftieth percentile.
Even knowing all the weaknesses of this assessment, associate professor Tuleja cannot be considered at least an above-average scientific expert. And it cannot be said at all that his publications in predatory journals were an unintended consequence of being overloaded with hundreds of other articles, due to which he accidentally did not pay attention to something. ResearchGate lists only 37 publication items associated with his name.
For a certain understanding of the context, I would also like to give examples of interesting works of other well-known Czech economists, as evaluated by the ResearchGate network. Miroslav Ševčík, whose case made the University of Economics so visible, is in the 42nd percentile. Former presidential candidate Danuše Nerudová is at a respectable 86th percentile, and another former presidential candidate, Jan Švejnar, is even at the 98th percentile. In other words, Professor Švejnar belongs to the two percent and Professor Nerudová to the fourteen percent of scientists with the most interesting scientific works according to this assessment.
These rankings are nowhere near as accurate as those of tennis. An objective assessment of the quality of scientific works is always burdened with a lot of errors and limits. However, the offered measurement has at least some, albeit imprecise, informative value. At least it serves to keep us sober. And so that the one who is actually playing for the regional championship cannot be mistaken for a scientific star.
Unfortunately, this is how the government party TOP 09 announced the arrival of its new minister for science and research. Maybe that was his main problem. Because otherwise it has become a strange habit that ministers are often not experts in their field.
And one more general and very important problem is shown by the case of the unsuccessful ministerial candidate. Czech science urgently needs the transfer of resources to outstanding scientists. There is no reason to support the others. But that would have to finally go from proclamations to actions. That is, to the reform of Czech science.
