Citation

Wee B. Transp. Rev. 2020; 40(4): 407-410.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/01441647.2020.1726104

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

A couple of years ago my colleague (and former PhD student) Jan Anne Annema told me that he checked why people cited our paper on experiences with the use of Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) in the Netherlands (Annema, Koopmans, & Van Wee, 2007). Several citations only used the paper to underpin the claim that in the Netherlands CBAs were carried out for large transport infrastructure projects. Such references did not relate at all to the core of the paper on the experiences with the actual use of CBA in the Netherlands. Nevertheless, citations play an important role in several scientific output metrics.

Over the last decade, there has been a lively debate on measuring scientific output via metrics (see, for example, Salimi (2017) for an overview of literature and a proposal for a method to integrate metrics). One of the debates has been over the pros and cons of publishing in journals (see, for example, the editorial of Ken Button in Transport Reviews, published in 2015 - Button, 2015).

DISCUSSIONs are manifold, ranging from manipulating impact factors (Chorus & Waltman, 2016), to the importance of journal papers relative to other output. See Hicks, Wouters, Waltman, De Rijcke, and Rafols (2015) for a discussion on metrics and how to improve the use of metrics.

Language: en