Calit2 is a general public, visually pleasing expertise finding system that incorporates now-classic Web 2.0 techniques such as tag clouds and AJAX. It is focused on researchers associated with the California Institute for Telecommunication and Information Technology, basically scientists at the University of California San Diego (UCSD).

Launched in 2007, it covers more than 650 researchers and does a nice job of being informative without being overwhelming. However, like all such academic systems that I know of, it doesn’t provide comparative information of the sort that would enable differentiating scientists in terms of research domains, degree of expertise, or scientific prominence (aka “research impact”).

For example, as of this writing it lists16 scientists involved in bioinformatics. Great stuff, but you can’t easily distinguish their specific research areas within bioinformatics (yes, a tough task indeed), nor generate a report that would give you a sense of how influential each researcher in terms of numbers of papers, grants and grant dollars, patents, etc.

As I said earlier, the latter limitation is typical of academic systems, presumably because their researchers might not appreciate being ranked in such an explicit manner, even though this is precisely what happens when they are evaluated for tenure, and to a lesser extent, when applying for funding. And of course, we’re just applying the GPA principle, though one could argue that one’s GPA isn’t being displayed for all to see and that the number is calculated when one has to join a school, admittedly not the case here…

This is one reason we provide a ranking of researchers using our GOPR score. Since we’re not beholden to any particular research institution, and although we’re trying to be sensitive about it, ResearchScorecard can afford to take the risk of annoying some of our fellow scientists, or at least as long as our ranking system makes sense and is operating correctly. I hasten to say that ranking scientists (or any professional) in a rigorous and fair manner is difficult indeed. We’re definitely not done here, and so we’re always very interested in hearing suggestions and comments from our, ahem, “research subjects”.

And if you would like to raise your ranking, it’s actually very straightforward to do so. All one has to do is to get more grants, publish more papers and obtain more patents, among other things. Hey, I didn’t say it would be easy…