Over the past week this tweet was doing the rounds. I’m not sure where it comes from or precisely what its original context was, but it appeared in my feed from folks in various student analytics and big data crowds. The message I took was “measurement looks complicated until you pin it down”. But what I took from this was something a bit different. Once upon a time the idea of temperature was a complex thing.

Image via Wikipedia David Crotty, over at Scholarly Kitchen has an interesting piece on metrics, arguing that many of these have not been thought through because they don’t provide concrete motivation to researchers to care about them.

Cultural change won’t happen overnight and may never happen at all. Policy mandates are a blunt instrument and may lead to a backlash. So how do we align incentives for researchers with the aim of making their research outputs more widely and effectively useable? Get the metrics right and the competitive market could manage the rest of the optimisation problem for us.