Not a Basketball Fan? (Neither Are We) Check Out This Bracket that Puts School Head-to-Head Based on the Scientific Research They’re Doing

It’s March, and for a lot of people that means college basketball in the form of a big NCAA tournament. For even more people, it means a lot of other things being arranged into brackets to try to jump in on the “March Madness” madness. This might be our favorite version of that so far. It has school compete based on the scientific research they do.

The Metrics Mania tournament is sponsored by Thomson Reuters, a company that’s all about tracking information for businesses and professionals. According to their press release, here’s how the tournament itself will work:

Thomson Reuters Metrics Mania will align the institutions in six rounds of weekly competition to determine the final winner of the Research Crown. Winners will be identified by reports pulled from Thomson Reuters InCites^TM, the leading web-based research analytics platform enabling institutions to measure research output and impact, monitor trends, and benchmark performance against peers at the individual, departmental and global levels.

Basically, whichever school’s research makes a bigger splash each week will come out on top. The rounds are broken up to use different metrics each week. Rounds 1 & 2 count how many times a school’s research is cited. Rounds 3 & 4 look at the percentage of documents cited, and Rounds 5 & 6 look at the “Normalized Citation Impact.” We’ve reached out to our contact at the tournament to ask what that is, and will update when we hear back.

I’ll be filling out a bracket and encouraging the rest of the Geekosystem team to do so as well. If they do (they have to, I’m the Senior Editor) we’ll post our brackets here and probably trash talk each other on Twitter until this thing ends on April 8th.

As of March 17th users can register to fill out their bracket. If you do so by the end of the day today, March 18th, you get three bonus points that could help your score. Warren Buffett is offering $1 Billion if someone can fill out a perfect NCAA bracket (because it’s basically impossible). Thomson Reuters doesn’t have quite that much cash to throw around, but the ten people with the most points in their tournament will get $100 American Express gift cards. It’s not $1 Billion, but your odds are a lot better.

You can fill out your bracket on the Thomson Reuters Metric Mania site and see how you do.

(via Thomson Reuters)

Meanwhile in related links

• Seriously, your odds of getting a perfect bracket are terrible
• Some geeks explain the NCAA tournament with Star Wars
• Jimmy Kimmel shows you how to pretend to care about basketballs