Contributions and Connections

By Thomas Carey. In the academy, reputations and influence measures speak to status and standing. They circulate signals of capacity and credibility by boiling down complex indicators: the journals we publish in, the school(s) we’re affiliated with, our citation counts and h-indexes, our last grants, our ranks in the academic hierarchy. These proxies for quality combine prestige, metrics, and recognizability into a mercurial mix that can be circulated and understood across disciplines and ideological lines, but never quite reduced to its component parts. More...