The news is a bit old already, but I have to share it anyway: The australian will not rank the scientific venues by letters anymore . This is particularly welcome because this kind of ranking were sterile and suffered of many bias. I really think that there is no way to accurately rank researchers using simple metrics. They are smart people, and tricks to fool the metrics will soon be found. Actually, the main way to devise of the quality of a research is ... actually reading what he has to say. That's what Dijkstra said: "By urging young scientists to submit papers for publication and to apply for grants so that we can rely on the judgements of others we make ourselves ridiculous". Read the rest of this great letter here.

The most depressing idea that I had in the last few months is on a related topic. I was trying to guess the amount of papers that are actually read at some point (not counting the reviewers and editors). Yeah, I'm not even speaking of the paper read by more than 10 people or more, but the ones read by at least one person. By reading I mean reading it all (even if not linearly) and trying to understand the ideas behind (to reuse them, for example). So the rapid skim through the abstract + conclusion only would not count here. It's naturally impossible to evaluate this precisely, but my guess is that this number is hardly over 50%. Most of the collegues that I asked do agree on this (and some of them would go for a 10% estimate). I feel that we should stop writting papers for the autors and their CVs, and start again writing papers for the readers...