Independence: A New Performance Indicator for Researchers?

A scientist's achievements are often measured in terms of the number of papers they publish (productivity) and how many citations those papers get (impact). These 'bibliometric indicators' are widely derided but they have proven remarkably stubborn.Now, in a new preprint on bioRxiv, researchers Peter van den Besselaar and Ulf Sandström propose a new metric that, they say, could measure another important researcher characteristic: independence.For van den Besselaar and Sandström, inde