Astronomer retracts paper on use of data to make hiring decisions because it could harm ‘women and minorities’

University of Texas at Austin astronomer John Kormendy retracted a paper and paused a book about the use of hard data in the hiring and funding of professors after criticism that it harmed women and racial minorities.

Kormendy (right), known for his research on black holes, published the paper at arXiv as a preprint and submitted it for publication to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He retracted the paper but an archived version can be found here. A book on the same subject has been paused.

“This paper calibrates how metrics derivable from the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System can be used to estimate the future impact of astronomy research careers and thereby to inform decisions on resource allocation such as job hires and tenure decisions,” a summary posted at arXiv says. “Three metrics are used, citations of refereed papers, citations of all publications normalized by the numbers of co-authors, and citations of all first-author papers.”