The International Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM), the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics (IMS), and the International Mathematical Union (IMU) have formed a Committee of "Quantitative Assessment of Research" that will investigate various aspects of the quantitative assessment of research in mathematics. The Committee will, in particular, look into impact factors and similar ways to measure research output.
The Committee consists of:
- Robert Adler (Haifa, Israel),
appointed by IMS; - John Ewing (Providence, USA),
appointed by IMU; - Peter Taylor (Melbourne, Australia),
appointed by ICIAM.
The Committee is expected to create a summary of its findings to be endorsed by the Executive Committees of ICIAM, IMS, and IMU and to be published afterwards.
ICIAM, IMS, and IMU have formulated an aspirational charge to help set direction rather than prescribe the final outcome of the committee's work; see
http://www.mathunion.org/Publications/2007/Charge-ComOnQuantAssessmRes070521.pdf ,
http://www.mathunion.org/fileadmin/IMU/Report/CitationStatistics.pdf .