Can Data Measure Faculty Productivity? Rutgers Professors Say No; Chronicle of Higher Education, 12/11/15

Ellen Wexler, Chronicle of Higher Education; Can Data Measure Faculty Productivity? Rutgers Professors Say No:

"The data come from Academic Analytics, a company that measures scholarly productivity. It adds up professors’ journal articles, citations, books, research grants, and awards, and compares those numbers with national benchmarks. At the moment, the database includes more than 270,000 faculty members.

Rutgers bought a license for the service in 2013. And on Monday the School of Arts and Sciences faculty will vote on a resolution calling for the university to limit how it uses the data. On Wednesday union leaders will meet with the university’s academic and labor-relations team to discuss the issue.

"The way scholarship aids public discourse is by being innovative, being interdisciplinary, taking risks," Mr. Hughes said. "Academic Analytics doesn’t measure or value those kinds of unconventional forms of research and publishing."

Faculty-union leaders are wary of how the database will affect their profession. They’re worried that professors will feel obligated to produce work that’s reflected in their scores, and that the university will use flawed data to make decisions."