The danger of pseudo science in Informetrics

Abstract: Two papers have been archived to which this letter is complementary: 1) Opthof and Leydesdorff arxiv:1002.2769 2) Van Raan et al. arxiv:1003.2113 Van Raan at all claims that the order of operations (first dividing then adding) does not apply to citation analysis. In my contribution I discuss a few analogues in Physics and Medicine and argue that in no other field of science where quantities have physical or financial meaning, implying that that numbers have a real unit of measure, it would be allowed to ignore the rule of operations. Hence, the claim of CWTS that the order of operations is not relevant brings studies ignoring this rule as done by CWTS in the category 'Pseudo Science'.