ON TURKEYS, CHICKEN AND QUOTATION INDEXES

Abstract

Analysis of Reuters company quotation list which ranks anthropological journals shows methodological errors in the process of this quotation list’s construction. That list is based on American tradition of four-field anthropology and it evenly treats journals that belong to completely different scientific disciplines – biophysical anthropology, prehistoric anthropology, anthropological linguistics, and socio-cultural anthropology. Four entirely different academic communities cannot be compared by simple citations’ count, and additional commotion is set in by other types of journals which are also ranked – those would be journals encompassing all four disciplines, journals which include some of the disciplines and another non-anthropological science (sociocultural anthropology and sociology), and those that aren’t substantially linked with anthropology which deal with general questions of globalization, or display regional character observing a certain region multidisciplinary, which means historically, geographically, politically, economically, and anthropologically. Therefore, any ranking list of these journals would be equivalent with creation of a single scoreboard of four American national sports (baseball, hockey, basketball and football), and hence is of little use in America, and it has been completely rejected in Europe. Only Serbian administers of science appreciate this hybrid list and solicit it as an evaluation criterion and a model for making of an even more hybrid common top list of journals in Serbia which would list journals from various different sciences (history, archeology, art history, ethnology/anthropology, musicology), but also journals with exclusive focus on parts of these sciences (military history, numismatics, Byzantine studies or heritage research etc.). This makes this list useless for evaluation of a particular journal, and socially dangerous were it to be used as a criterion for funding of certain sciences and journals.