By Karl Leif Bates
Yeah, we’re a bit excitable.
Hoping to triumph where our men’s and women’s basketball teams fell short, the Duke faculty are in the Final Four of an alternative NCAA bracket based on academic publications that’s being run by Thomson Reuters.
Sure, it’s a gimmick to get people looking at Thomson Reuters’ powerful but somewhat pricey InCites citation database — but we’re winning!
By the reckoning of the “Metrics Mania” bracket, Duke is squaring off in the final with Stanford in a contest of “normalized citation impact” of our scholarly work. (It’s a weighted average of citations per paper that controls for year published and subject area.)
Joining us in the Final Four are Harvard and Wisconsin — kudos to the Badgers for making it both ways! We’ve apparently already beat Wisconsin on the normalized citation business, so now it’s on to the Cardinal.
Previous rounds had us clobbering Mercer (cough) and Iowa on absolute number of citations and then squeaking past Michigan and NC State on percentage of documents cited.
The national champion will be announced Tuesday, after the basketball game, Thomson Reuters’ savvy PR operation says.
*** UPDATE – Tuesday, April 8 ***
Stanford was declared the winner. We’re done talking about this. 🙁
