Denouncing the imposter factor | Ouvertures immédiates

abernard102@gmail.com 2016-01-03

Summary:

"In 2013, the American Society for Cell Biology and several scientific journals launched the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, DORA, meant to put an end to the ridiculously unscientific practice of using the impact factor of journals to assess individual researchers or research groups or even institutions. According to the original text, this practice creates biases and inaccuracies when appraising scientific research. The impact factor must no longer be considered as « a measure of the quality of individual research articles, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions ». At this day 12,747 institutions and individuals worldwide have signed the DORA. And yet only a handful of institutions who have signed it have actually implemented the DORA. Review committees, assessment jurys, funding organizations and academic authorities have continued using, openly or discreetly, the journal impact factor as a determining element of judgement on the output of scientific research. Let’s look at data collected patiently by my collaborator Paul Thirion (ULg) whom I thank for this : he listed all 1,944 articles published in Nature in 2012 and 2013 and looked at how many times each one has been cited in 2014. Only 75 of them (3.8%) provide 25% of the journal’s citations, hence of the journal’s impact factor (IF = 41.4…, I’ll spare you the other digits !) and 280 (14,4%) do account for half of the total citations & IF… While 214 (11%) get 0 or 1 citation. A graphic representation is even more striking ..."

Link:

https://bernardrentier.wordpress.com/2015/12/31/denouncing-the-imposter-factor/

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.impact oa.jif oa.prestige oa.dora oa.declarations oa.signatures oa.metrics

Date tagged:

01/03/2016, 10:02

Date published:

01/03/2016, 05:02