Impact-Driven Research. What Prospects for Engineering?

This working paper has two motivations: one is to clarify the personal impact of a research scientist, with focus on problems affecting engineering research, and how it compares with the impact of fundamental sciences; the other issue deals with the pressure to improve University rankings, which are a daily preoccupation of the University management system across the world; the latter problem hardly worries the average academic in his office. Most bibliometric methods give a clear advantage to ``contractors'' indexes; citations per paper do not differentiate between real contributors and the ``honorary authors''; they offer an advantage to scientists pursuing networking and office politics.