A scientist's achievements are often measured in terms of the number of papers they publish (productivity) and how many citations those papers get (impact). These 'bibliometric indicators' are widely derided but they have proven remarkably stubborn.
Now, in a new preprint on bioRxiv, researchers Peter van den Besselaar and Ulf Sandström propose a new metric that, they say, could measure another important researcher characteristic: independence. For van den Besselaar and Sandström, independence means doing your own thing, as opposed to doing your supervisor's thing (they seem to have junior researchers in mind mainly):
We define an 'independent investigator' as one who enjoys independence of thought - the freedom to define the problem of interest and/or to choose or develop the best strategies and approaches to address that problem...
A researcher could be highly productive and publish lots of high-impact papers, but they might still lack independence:
A successful researcher of ...
