As professional scientists (or soon to be professional scientists), part of our job is to assess our colleagues' work. Often these assessments are associated with decisions about promotion or tenure. Valuing a scientist's contributions can be tricky, especially when you do not share his or her field of specialization. It's tempting to turn to simple bibliometrics---citation data and the statistics derived from them.The International Mathematical Union has recently released a report about the uses and misuses of bibliometrics. Applying these metrics (e.g., impact factors) to rank papers, journals, and individual scientists is problematic at best. At worst, it's misleading.
In addition to making these points quite convincingly, the report includes some fascinating graphs. Consider, for example, the graph of the average number of citations per article for various disciplines. What do you think this implies for impact factors?
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