[Logica-l] How good is your maths?

[Adolfo Neto]

Goodhart's law: "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
measure".


http://plus.maths.org/content/how-good-your-maths



 Submitted by mf344 on September 9, 2010

Bad statistics can mislead, and who'd know this better than mathematicians?
It's ironic, then, that mathematics itself has fallen victim to the
seductive lure of crude numbers. Mathematicians' work is being measured,
ranked and judged on the basis of a single statistic: the number of times
research papers are being cited by others. And mathematicians are not happy
about it.

Is this good maths?

Like any other area in receipt of public money, mathematical research needs
to be accountable. A reasonable way to judge the quality of research is the
impact it has on future research: ground-breaking work will be heavily
discussed and built upon, and mediocre work largely ignored. Traditionally,
the reputations of individual researchers, institutions, or research
journals have hinged on the opinions of experts in the field. The rationale
behind using citation statistics is that bare numbers can overcome the
inherent subjectivity of these judgments. In a competitive world it's the
bottom line that should do the talking.

Bottom lines are crude, however, and summary statistics open to misuse. A
whiff of scandal floated through this year's International Congress of
Mathematicians , when
the mathematician Douglas N. Arnold (president of the Society for Industrial
and Applied Mathematics) exposed what appears like a blatant example of
citation fraud. It involves the *International Journal of Nonlinear Science
and Numerical Simulations* (IJNSNS) and a summary statistic called the *impact
factor*.

The impact factor of a journal measures the average number of citations per
article in the journal, but only taking into account citations from the *
current* year to articles that have appeared in the previous *two* years. So
old citations don't count and neither do citations to articles that are
older than three years.

IJNSNS has topped the impact factor chart for applied maths journals for the
last four years by a massive margin. In 2009 its impact factor was more than
double that of the second in line, the esteemed*Communications on Pure and
Applied Mathematics* (CPAM). A panel of experts, however, had rated IJNSNS
in its second-to-last category: as having a "solid, though not outstanding
reputation". In the experts' opinion IJNSNS comes at best 75th in the
applied maths journal rankings, nowhere near the top.

There are some easy explanations for this mis-match between the impact
factor chart and expert opinion. A closer look at citation statistics shows
that 29% of the citations to IJNSNS (in 2008) came from the editor-in-chief
of the journal and two colleagues who sit on its editorial board. A massive
70% of citations to IJNSNS that contributed to its impact factor came from
other publications over which editors of IJNSNS had editorial influence. An
example is the proceedings of a conference that had been organised by
IJNSNS's editor-in-chief Ji-Huan He. He controlled the peer review process
that srcutinised papers submitted to the proceedings.

Another striking statistic is that 71.5% of citations to IJNSNS just
happened to cite articles that appeared in the two-year window which counts
towards the impact factor (the 71.5% is out of citations from 2008 to
articles that have appeared since 2000). That's compared to 16% for CPAM. If
you use a five-year citation window (from 2000 to 2005) to calculate the
impact factor, IJNSNS's factor drops dramatically, from 8.91 to 1.27.

The conclusions from this are obvious: cite your own journal as often as
possible (with citations falling in the two-year window) and make sure that
authors who fall under your editorial influence do the same, and you can
propel your journal to the top of the rankings.

Libraries use impact factors to make purchasing decisions,
but mathematicians are judged by them too.

What's worrying is that impact factors are not just being used to rank
journals, but also to assess the calibre of the researchers who publish in
them and the institutions that employ these researchers. "I've received
letters from [mathematicians] saying that their monthly salaries will depend
on the impact factors of the journals they publish in. Departments and
universities are being judged by impact factors," says Martin Grötschel,
Secretary of the International Mathematical Union, which published a highly
critical report on citation statistics in 2008.

Grötschel dismisses the blind use of impact factors as "nonsense" and not
just because they are open to manipulation. For mathematics in particular,
the two-year window that counts towards the impact factor is simply too
short. There are examples of seminal maths papers that didn't get cited for
decades. In fact, scouring 3 million recent citations in 

[Logica-l] LSFA 2011 - First call for papers

[Elaine Pimentel]

LSFA 2011 - Sixth Workshop on Logical and Semantic Frameworks, with
Applications
August 27th, 2011,
Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil

Scope

Logical and semantic frameworks are formal languages used to represent
logics, languages and systems. These frameworks provide foundations for
formal specification of systems and programming languages, supporting
tool development and reasoning.

The objective of this one-day workshop is to put together theoreticians
and practitioners to promote new techniques and results, from the
theoretical side, and feedback on the implementation and the use of such
techniques and results, from the practical side.

Topics of interest to this forum include, but are not limited to:

 * Logical frameworks
 o Proof theory
 o Type theory
 o Automated deduction
 * Semantic frameworks
 o Specification languages and meta-languages
 o Formal semantics of languages and systems
 o Computational and logical properties of semantic frameworks
 * Implementation of logical and/or semantic frameworks
 * Applications of logical and/or semantic frameworks

LSFA 2011 also aims to be a forum for presenting and discussing work in
progress, and therefore to provide feedback to authors on their
preliminary research. Submissions to the workshop will in the form of
full papers. The proceedings are produced only after the meeting, so
that authors can incorporate this feedback in the published papers.

Invited Speakers

01  Camilo Rueda (PUJ - Colombia)
02  (TBC)

Program Committee

Simona Ronchi della Rocca (co-chair, UNITO, Italy)
Elaine Gouvêa Pimentel (co-chair, UFMG, Brazil)
Luis Farinas del Cerro (IRIT, France)
Edward Hermann Haeusler (PUC-Rio, Brazil)
Jonathan Seldin (Univ-Lethbridge , Canada)
Maurício Ayala-Rincón (UnB, Brazil)
Mario Benevides (Coppe-UFRJ, Brazil)
Eduardo Bonelli (UNQ, Argentina)
Marcelo Corrêa (IM-UFF, Brazil)
Clare Dixon (Liverpool, UK)
Gilles Dowek (Polytechnique-Paris, France)
William Farmer (Mcmaster, Canada)
Maribel Fernández (King's College, UK)
Marcelo Finger (IME-USP, Brazil)
Alwyn Goodloe (NASA LaRC)
Fairouz Kamareddine (Heriot-Watt Univ, UK)
Delia Kesner (Paris-Jussieu, France)
Luis da Cunha Lamb (UFRGS, Brazil)
Joao Marcos (UFRN, Brazil)
Flavio L. C. de Moura (UnB, Brazil)
Ana Teresa Martins (UFC, Brazil)
Martin Musicante (UFRN, Brazil)
Cláudia Nalon (UnB, Brazil)
Vivek Nigam (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
Luca Paolini (UNITO, Italy)


Organizing Committee

Mauricio Ayala-Rincón
Edward Hermann Hauesler PUC-Rio
Elaine Pimentel (Local-chair)
Simona Ronchi della Rocca

Dates and Submission

Paper submission deadline:   May 23
Author notification: June 30
Camera ready:July 31st

Contributions should be written in English and submitted in the form
full papers with at most 16 pages. They must be unpublished and not
submitted simultaneously for publication elsewhere. The submission
should be in the form of a PDF file uploaded to LSFA 2011 page at
EasyChair until the submission deadline in May 23, by midnight, Central
European Standard Time (GMT+1).

The papers should be prepared in latex using EPTCS style. The
workshop pre-proceedings, containing the reviewed extended abstracts,
will be handed-out at workshop registration and the proceedings will be
published as a volume of EPTCS.

After the workshop, according to the quantity and quality of selected
papers, the authors will be invited to submit full versions of their
works that will be also reviewed to high standards. A special issue of
the first edition of the workshop appeared in the Journal of Algorithms,
a special issue of the second edition of the workshop appeared
in the J.IGPL and a special edition of TCS is being prepared with selected
contributions from the third and the forth editions of LSFA.

At least one of the authors should register at the conference. The
paper presentation should be in English.

Venue

Belo Horizonte is the capital of the state of Minas Gerais and the
third-largest metropolitan area in Brazil. A city surrounded by mountains,
quite big, but still with this countryside town air.

Contact Information

For more information please contact the chairs

The web page of the event can be reached at:

http://www.mat.ufmg.br/lsfa2011/

Elaine.
-
Elaine Pimentel  - DMat/UFMG

Address: Departamento de Matematica
 Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
 Av Antonio Carlos, 6627 - C.P. 702
 Pampulha - CEP 30.161-970
 Belo Horizonte - Minas Gerais - Brazil
Phone:   55 31 3409-5970
Fax: 55 31 3409-5692
http://www.mat.ufmg.br/~elaine
-

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