Response to “ideational influence, connectedness, and venue representation: Making an assessment of scholarly capital”

I respond to Cueller, Takeda, Vidgen & Truex (2016), who proposes three measures of scholarly output: “1) the extent to which other scholars take up the scholar’s work (ideational influence), 2) who the scholar works with (connectedness), and 3) how well the scholar publishes in venues in the scholar’s field (venue representation)” (p. 3). These are not novel and valid measures of research output. Ideational influence is operationalized as counting citations, which improve current practice but is not novel. Connectedness assesses position in a co-authorship network and rewards the cronies of central players without assessing their output. Venue representation involves counting papers in a different basket, which commits an ecological fallacy. Connectedness and venue representation are based on a common misinterpretation of network centrality measures. Adopting either of these measures in practice would distract from actual impact and so be negative for our field.