ScienceOpen - ScienceOpen Blog

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-12-31

Summary:

"Along with over 10,000 others, I signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment DORA (http://www.ascb.org/dora). Why? I believe that the impact factor was a useful tool for the paper age, but that we now have the capability to develop much more powerful tools to evaluate research. For hundreds of years scientific discourse took place on paper – letters written and sent with the post, research cited in one’s own articles printed and distributed by publishers. Citation was the most direct way in many cases to respond directly to the research of another scientist. In the 1970s as scientific output began to boom, the impact factor was developed as a measure for librarians to manage their collections. Impact factors are calculated exclusively by Thompson Reuters for specific journals from the number of citations received by articles in year X published during the previous two years. Therefore, an impact factor can reflect the changing status of a journal within a research area, as the number of citations increases or declines – assuming that the number of citations an article receives is a measure of its 'importance' for the scientific community. But how did we get from there to a number that informs all hierarchies in the natural sciences, from professor to lab tech from elite university to community college. For decades the impact factor was considered the single criterion to quantify the prestige of journals with which to attract submissions from researchers and subscriptions from libraries. During my academic career as a physicist I published more than 20 papers in international journals between 1993 and 2001. I was eager to succeed and made sure that all of my papers were published in journals which had an impact factor, some of them even submitted to high-impact 'luxury' journals to quote Randy Schekman(http://goo.gl/sXRars). However I also submitted one of my papers to a journal with no impact factor because it had been recently launched. The result was that this work was only rarely read as the new journal had a low subscription base so only very few people could access it – which resulted in fewer citations, the coin of the realm ..."

Link:

https://www.scienceopen.com/discussion/7ed7a938-a0bd-415c-b539-0b1d3ffbe4e8/612f7056-2efd-40ea-984e-1cf2f845498d

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.advocacy oa.impact oa.prestige oa.jif oa.altmetrics oa.dora oa.metrics

Date tagged:

12/31/2013, 08:25

Date published:

12/31/2013, 03:25