Suchergebnisse

My recent publication highlighting the unintended steering influences of publication incentives on the research agenda of Mexican ecological scientists elicited a vehement critique from two renowned Mexican ecologists, Williams and Morrone. The argument I advance is that Mexico's National System of Researchers (SNI) unintentionally steers ecological researchers away from the knowledge needs of local, national, and regional users of scientific knowledge and relinquishes research priority-setting to individuals and institutions disconnected from Mexico's knowledge needs. Rather than engaging with the substance of argument, these critics focus on what they believe to be factual errors. In their response, Williams and Morrone effectively but unintentionally confirm the premise, mechanism, and indeed the key factual claims in my article. I stand behind my analysis as published.

Governmental spending on science is usually justified by claims that the resulting research will yield benefits for the sponsoring nation. I present policy-analytic and ethnographic research—based on 30 hour-long interviews—of the Mexican ecological research community to explore the structural influence of publication incentives on research content and its relevance to national needs. During a financial crisis in the 1980s, Mexico created a national publication incentive system, the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores, to identify and reward scientists producing the most and the most-cited research as defined by dominant international scientific norms at the time. The system has increased productivity but in the process has undermined that country's ability to benefit from its ecological research by surrendering priority setting to the editorial preferences of journals that are linguistically and financially unavailable to potential domestic users. The Mexican experience has implications for institutions worldwide that utilize quantitative productivity measures in researcher evaluation.