Growing Sour With KPIs: Case of Mathematical Sciences

I'm very much well aware that I am not a prolific researcher (producing large quantities of papers is totally unheard of in my area) and certainly administrative matters is not really my cup of tea. But I do care about the development of science particularly theoretical sciences in our university and the country. However it seems that I have been classed unconditionally as a non-performing academic, which is pretty depressing.

As far as I know, I have never stayed idle with respect to research. I believe I have contributed in putting a theoretical physics group in place from being virtually nonexistent in the university. I have ventured into areas that many fear of doing so and tried to open opportunities in such areas. Some of these are quantization, quantum theory on punctured surfaces, hyperbolic geometry, quantum foundations, mathematical aspects of cosmology, complex networks, symplectic geometry in quantum information. Many times I have been asked to examine thesis and review papers on difficult  theoretical subjects. With potential oversea partners, I have tried my best to make things work and show others that we are doing some form of respectable theoretical sciences. I have also contributed in the progress made in Malaysian Journal of Mathematical Sciences by adopting LaTeX platform, an online submission system and a better international outlook. But I guess all these did not matter much. I don't like to make excuses and I know there is a need to improve. I try to stay above politics and have avoided rubbing shoulders with those highly ranked so that things are more favourable to us. Being classed as a non-performer and believing in leadership by example, it is perhaps better to consider that I be relieved of my current position as deputy director and chief editor of a journal and leave these to more deserving persons.

Being in administration for some time, I understand the tendency to follow KPIs by numbers as an easy way to monitor progress. Wisdom would however will tell us to be cautious about this and consider the details of research culture in different sciences. Even within mathematical sciences itself, there are variations. Mathematicians worldwide have been concerned with the blanket use of metrics to assess research and there have already been a few statements issued about this:

• From American Mathematical Society, https://www.ams.org/profession/leaders/culture/CultureStatement09.pdf 
• From International Mathematical Union, https://www.mathunion.org/fileadmin/CEIC/ICM_2014_panels/Evaluation_of_individuals__FINAL.pdf 

On citation statistics, there are a few publications on the variations in different sciences:

• Robert Adler, John Ewing & Peter Taylor, Citation Statistics,  https://arxiv.org/abs/0910.3529
• Gregory Patience, Christian Patience, Bruno Blais & Francois Bertrand, Citation Analysis of Scientific Categories, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405844016322800 

On making publication measures as a target, we have to remember Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Recently there is a study that shows that Goodhart's Law are already in action for academic publishing metrics:

• Michael Fire & Carlos Guestrin, Over-Optimization of Academic Publishing Metrics: Observing Goodhart's Law in Action

I believe the management and decision makers are perhaps aware of the issues I have mentioned above, and my wishes for them to be highly wise in their decision and policy making.

For me, I hope the current incident will not kill my passion for science and my wish to continue to contribute in wherever I can (in a natural way).