Transparency promised for vilified impact factor : Nature News & Comment

abernard102@gmail.com 2014-07-31

Summary:

" ... Information firm Thomson Reuters says that it will become more transparent over how it calculates impact factors, an annual ranking of more than 10,900 scientific journals that it published on 29 July, along with the names of 39 journals that it is barring from the list. The firm, which is headquartered in New York, is also revamping its commercial analysis product, InCites, to add metrics based on individual articles, and to allow users to make their own calculations. But critics say that more change is needed. The impact factor was invented to help libraries decide which journals to purchase: roughly speaking, a journal with a higher impact factor attracts more citations. But it has become a seductive yardstick by which to judge the quality of researchers and their papers — angering scientists who say that they are judged by where they publish, rather than what they publish ... Last year, Bertuzzi coordinated a statement signed by hundreds of research organizations and more than 11,000 scientists, the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), which deplored the abuse of the impact factor and called for better ways to evaluate research. But he and Pulverer also sent a private letter to Thomson Reuters asking it to improve the way in which it calculates impact factors. That letter was never answered, they say, so on Friday 25 July they made it public on the DORA website ... Thomson Reuters also announced that 39 journals will not receive an impact factor this year — a record number for journals barred in a single year — because of excessive self-citation or ‘citation stacking’ from papers in other journals.  One journal that has now been caught out in two successive years for citation stacking is theInternational Journal of Sensor Networks (IJSN). Thomson Reuters found that it was heavily cited in articles published in the Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference. And two articles in those proceedings that cited the IJSN heavily were co-authored by the IJSN's editor-in-chief, Yang Xiao ... 

Link:

http://www.nature.com/news/transparency-promised-for-vilified-impact-factor-1.15642

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.dora oa.advocacy oa.impact oa.citations oa.altmetrics oa.prestige oa.thomson_reuters oa.metrics

Date tagged:

07/31/2014, 07:58

Date published:

07/31/2014, 03:58