The importance of metrics for evaluating scientific performance.

Evaluation of scientific performance is a major factor that determines the behavior of both individual researchers and the academic institutes to which they belong. Because the number of researchers heavily outweighs the number of available research posts, and the competitive funding accounts for an everincreasing proportion of research budget, some objective indicators of research performance have gained recognition for increasing transparency and openness. It is common practice to use metrics and indices to evaluate a researcher's performance or the quality of their grant applications. Such measures include the number of publications, the number of times these papers are cited and, more recently, the h-index, which measures the number of highly-cited papers the researcher has written. However, academic institutions and funding agencies in Japan have been rather slow to adopt such metrics. In this article, I will outline some of the currently available metrics, and discuss why we need to use such objective indicators of research performance more often in Japan. I will also discuss how to promote the use of metrics and what we should keep in mind when using them, as well as their potential impact on the research community in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]