Management of science

Today I had a meeting at Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. The DFG is the federal government's science-funding and science-policy department (Forschung means "research" and gemeinschaft means "company" or "organization"). They are just a few blocks East of here (and have the big cafeteria where we usually eat).

In any case, they fund iFQ so we meet with them from time to time. Unlike the NRC, they don't do any research themselves, so it is more like Canada's NSERC. In fact, they apparently signed an agreement with NSERC recently to encourage post-doc collaborations between Canada and Germany.

It is really nice to work in a place that values bibliometrics and which is interested in using the results of our work to shape German science. In contrast, while the NRC had heard of bibliometrics and was happy to give Montreal's Science-Metrix buckets of money for the simplest kind of citation-counting, there was never any awareness that it could be actively used to manage science more effectively. It seemed to serve the function of supplying numbers in order to bring some gravitas to reports.

Over on this side of the pond, while bibliometricians are not exactly thick on the ground, it is not uncommon for universities to have a staff bibliometrican. I doubt if there is a university in Canada that does the same thing, and as of three months ago, the NRC no longer has that sort of expertise.