Hidden levers of science are set to become more accessible to all | Education | Universities | Mail & Guardian

" ... The coming changes affect the ways in which the value and impact of individual contributions will be measured, the access that all scientists and scholars will henceforth have to the "scientific literature" and a general levelling of the global playing fields.  The first of the sea changes has to do with the determination of the role and value of journals and the articles they contain.  Nearly everyone knows Garfield, the lovable cartoon cat who became for a while the world's most popular comic strip. Few are aware that another Garfield, a human first-named Eugene, shaped virtually the entire practice of modern science through two successive and related innovations.  The rapid growth of scientific literature in the mid-20th century made it difficult for individual scientists to keep track of what was being published in an ever-increasing number of often specialised journals. Garfield first produced a handy tool for doing precisely this, easily and efficiently, by publishing a monthly magazine called Current Contents, which showed the contents pages (article titles, author names and so-called metadata such as date, volume and page numbers) of a large number of selected journals grouped in broad fields. This made possible the quick perusal by busy scientists of much of what was happening in their areas of interest ... Garfield came up with his second and eventually far more influential idea for identifying what he called the 'core journals' collectively responsible for reporting most (say 80%) of significant scientific progress by looking in detail at the citations or bibliographic items included in every article in every journal in his collection ... Garfield saw that a powerful method for assessing the impact of a particular paper on later work, not only in its own narrow context but also more broadly, was the measurement of the number of times the earlier paper was cited in all later papers in the literature.  To standardise the measurement he chose a 'window' of two succeeding years. He averaged the citation rates of all papers in particular journals and called these the 'impact factors' of the journals concerned.   These 'impact factors' have for many years been considered the best possible proxy indicator of the general importance and rank of scientific journals. Journals with high impact factors were henceforth included in a commercially available journal citation index.  Garfield's big idea — propagated through the products of his Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) — rapidly spread its influence through the entire world ... Now, after years of 'impact factor' rule over the scientific world, a call for a rethink has come from no less an authority than the editor of one of the world's leading journals, Science, after a declaration in San Francisco by many leading lights.   The idea that the quality of a particular article should be judged primarily by the 'company that it keeps' in the pages of a journal with a particular 'impact factor' is being rejected for a host of reasons — among them the fact that the factor is an average of many values  rather than a measurement of the value or impact of a particular article; the serious distortions in the publishing system that the hunt for higher "impact factors" has generated; and the heavy bias against regional journals — especially those of developing countries — that the North-dominated ISI system has maintained.   The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment insists that, henceforth, 'article-level metrics' should be used to judge the value of each article — that is, its own merit, whether judged by its own citation record, or preferably by a combination of criteria, of which the chief one should be its intrinsic merits when read by knowledgeable peers.   Although a host of vested interests will undoubtedly fight like tigers to retain the present rating system primarily based on "impact factors", the cogency of the counter-arguments and the impact of other new developments in the journal publishing world (some of them described below) are likely to bring about pervasive change ..."