I am struggling to understand your concerns.
They have clearly taken a proxy for climate expertise which assumes that if you have published significant numbers of papers on climate studies, you are considered to be an expert in the climate. I suppose you could say that people who have written a single paper on the climate which disagrees with the mainstream view are experts as they have written a paper on it, but in as much as you wouldn't generally assess an undergrad as an expert over the seasoned professor, I think that's a pretty acceptable proxy.
Having said that, you could argue that a certain type of paper is less likely to be published than others, so the authors whose findings go against the mainstream belief are unjustifiably ignored in the analysis. What would be your solution? To count every document whichever the quality of the author or journal? I'm sure the bar for publication in the lower end journals is not particularly high.
Slashdot Mirror
I am struggling to understand your concerns. They have clearly taken a proxy for climate expertise which assumes that if you have published significant numbers of papers on climate studies, you are considered to be an expert in the climate. I suppose you could say that people who have written a single paper on the climate which disagrees with the mainstream view are experts as they have written a paper on it, but in as much as you wouldn't generally assess an undergrad as an expert over the seasoned professor, I think that's a pretty acceptable proxy. Having said that, you could argue that a certain type of paper is less likely to be published than others, so the authors whose findings go against the mainstream belief are unjustifiably ignored in the analysis. What would be your solution? To count every document whichever the quality of the author or journal? I'm sure the bar for publication in the lower end journals is not particularly high.