Sir

The problem that Jan Konvalinka and colleagues identify in their Correspondence — that the Czech bibliometric system for assessing grant proposals encourages mediocre research (Nature 460, 1079; 2009) — is widespread in eastern Europe. Some policy-makers are upholding the old systems for allocating funds in public universities and research institutes, rather than using them to promote the best science.

In Slovenia, a bibliometric system introduced a few years ago provides the main criteria for awarding research grants by national government, often overriding peer-reviewed evaluation. It divides scientific journals into categories that disregard impact factors, on the grounds that journals vary in quality for different fields. Although there may be some justification for the thinking behind this, the system in practice favours researchers who publish in low-impact journals over those who are struggling to do internationally competitive science and to publish in the best journals.

For example, a Slovenian endocrinologist might choose to publish a basic animal study in a prestigious endocrinology journal or in a much lower-impact agricultural journal. If the latter journal is rated at a higher position among agricultural journals than the former is in the field of endocrinology, the researcher will receive more points for publishing in the low-impact agricultural journal.

Likewise, a review article in a journal with no impact factor (but included in SCI, the science citation index) could be worth as many as 20 Slovenian bibliometric points, whereas one paper that was recently published in Nature — the result of years of work — gained its authors just 18.75 points each.

With the exception of the former East Germany, many universities and science policies in central and eastern European countries did not go through a transition period when the economy changed. Respected professors who grew up and were educated under a very different system are still the principal policy-makers and still represent the majority of grant holders, even though they have not necessarily proved themselves in internationally competitive science.