Assessing Research:The Slippery Slope

With the inevitable push towards better assessment of academics, new quantitative parameters have emerged such as the h-index, which is a measure of how many times an academic, typically a scientist, is cited by others in the field, and the impact factor (IF) of a journal, which is roughly an equivalent measure for the publishing medium itself. These numbers are a bit like retweets and ‘likes’ in Twitter. How many people like you and how many followers do you have? Is not it unfair that those with more followers get more retweets and ‘likes’ for putting out more or less the same kind of material?