“electrical engineer turned environmentalist” ranted against (mostly female) Indian historians, using h-index scores on Google Scholar as “evidence” since he should be considered a better historian as his score was higher when he finished his PhD presumably in engineering. 1/n

While this is par for the course for a female scholar with an online presence, it does create a teachable moment to think about how poor such indices are as measures for work in many disciplines- and how it systematically can affect funding for and career advancement in them.

While it might in obvious that a higher h-index score in engineering doesn’t make you a “better” scholar in history, when universities and regulatory bodies use metrics like this to divvy up funding for different disciplines that is EXACTLY the idiotic logic they are following.

Within disciplines too, h-index scores capture the structure of global knowledge production, not quality of scholarship. As an early modernist working on Brazil and India in US academia, my best article will never amass the readership of any scholar working on US history.

US historians are the bulk here (naturally- historians of India make up the bulk in India. History is tied to the nation.) Given the prestige and global reach of US-based journals and the size of US academia, however, this has an outsize effect on who gets read on what topic.

The problem is magnified for scholars who don’t publish in English, since the industry of academic publication is Anglophone. Engineers almost entirely and solely communicate findings in English. Many historians routinely do not.

If we solely decide on what is valuable to study based on h-index scores, much of world history will disappear entirely from academic production.

This man’s ire is because I study pre-modern Indian history and it doesn’t confirm his myths. I can only do so because my university understands that it is valuable to study this, even if few people read or can read my paywalled work (because academic publishing is a monopoly).

Knowledge cannot be produced to standards of popularity. That is called myth-making.