Bibliometric Evaluation of Researchers in the Internet Age

Research evaluation, which is an increasingly pressing issue, invariably relies on citation counts. In this contribution we highlight two concerns that the research community needs to pay attention to. One, in the world of search engine facilitated research, factors such as ease of web discovery, ease of access, and content relevance rather than quality influence what gets read and cited. Two, research evaluation based on citation counts works against many types of high-quality works. We will also elaborate on the implications of these points by examining a recent nation-wide evaluation of researchers performed in Italy. We focus on our discipline (computer science), but we believe that our observations have relevance for a broad audience.