An Outline of the Evaluation of the Results of Scientific Activity in Terms of Semantic Information

Abstract

The problem of appraising the results of scientific activity, evaluating their theoretical and practical relevance within science itself and in every sphere of human endeavour that puts scientific results to work, would appear to be as old as science itself. In recent years and decades the problem’s relevance has grown vastly thanks to a number of now familiar phenomena which can be summarised under a number of heads: the huge (in certain situations even exponential) growth in scientific output, the so-called information explosion, which is at the same time an explosion of redundance, the expansion of science into practically every sphere of living, and others. For these reasons it has become a matter of some considerable urgency to express and evaluate quantitatively and qualitatively all that can be distinguished at the output of contemporary science as a highly complex and heterogeneous system of activities. This also explains the effort put into the quantitative analysis of the impact of publications, problems of citation, copyright and other such problems, and the effort that goes into the economic evaluation of results at the output in connection with the economic evaluation of everything that may be considered as input elements of scientific and research set-ups, usually taken in terms of particular disciplines, institutions, countries or otherwise defined groupings.