Universities should not depend solely on citation statistics when making personnel decisions, the new head of Thomson Reuters¡¯ Scientific and Scholarly Research unit has said.

Gordon Macomber, who was appointed the unit¡¯s managing director earlier this month, described citations as a ¡°wonderful methodology¡± to analyse research because they are generated entirely by researchers themselves ¡°based on their need to produce the best research¡±.

But he said his company - which owns the widely used Web of Knowledge and Web of Science citation databases - had no control over the quality of the decisions its customers make, and admitted that over-reliance on citations in judging individual academics¡¯ performance had led to some ¡°bad decisions¡±.

¡°There are a lot of other variables on the table when you are making personnel decisions,¡± he said.

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Mr Macomber also unveiled plans to set up a customer advisory board and user forums to help co-create future products. He said this reflected a cultural shift whereby the company now regarded its products as belonging to its customers.

He said Thomson Reuters was monitoring the rise of article-level metrics and altmetrics - such as the number of mentions a paper receives on blogs and in social media - ¡°trying to tease out what looks right for us to become involved in¡±.

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But his unwillingness to jeopardise the Web of Knowledge¡¯s reputation as the ¡°gold standard¡± of metrics meant he would not be ¡°quick to make adjustments¡±.

That reputation also justified the platform¡¯s exclusivity in terms of the journals it indexed; critics have claimed that this makes it less useful to large, emerging research powers such as India, whose academics often publish in non-indexed journals, than its rivals.

He did not regard his company as being in competition with other platforms such as Google Scholar and Elsevier¡¯s Scopus, insisting that they were complementary.

¡°We do a lot of human curation, whereas Google Scholar is more algorithmically generated. The Web of Knowledge is relied on for consistency and transparency,¡± he said.

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paul.jump@tsleducation.com.