Source: Think Links

You should go read Jason Preim‘s excellent commentary in Nature –  Scholarship: Beyond the Paper but I wanted to call out a bit that I’ve talked about with a number of people and I think is important. We should be looking at how we build the best teams of scientists and not just looking for the single best individual:

Tenure and hiring committees will adapt, too, with growing urgency. Ultimately, science evaluation will become something that is done scientifically, exchanging arbitrary, biased, personal opinions for meaningful distillations of entire communities’ assessments. We can start to imagine the academic department as a sports team, full of complementary positions (theorists, methodologists, educators, public communicators, grant writers and so on). Coming years will see evaluators playing an academic version of Moneyball (the statistical approach to US baseball): instead of trying to field teams of identical superstars, we will leverage nuanced impact data to build teams of specialists who add up to more than the sum of their parts.

Science is a big team sport especially with today’s need for interdisciplinary and large-scale experiments. We need to encourage the building of teams in sciences.

Filed under: academia, altmetrics Tagged: moneyball, science, team