Impact Factor: what is it?

What is Impact Factor. This lecture explains all very clearly

Transcript

2. FOREWORD But in science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs. Sir Francis Darwin
3. JOURNAL IMPACT FACTOR - (THOMSON REUTERS) Developed in the 60’s  Eugene Garfield and Irving Sher  To help select journals for the SCI Journal Citation Reports first produced in 1975
4. JOURNAL CITATION REPORTS The JCR provides quantitative tools for ranking, evaluating, categorizing, and comparing journals (Thomson Reuters) The Impact Factor is one of these tools Derived using citation data in the Science Citation Index and the Social Science Citation Index Helps determine a publication’s impact and influence in the global research community (Thomson Reuters) Widely accepted and used
5. THE IMPACT FACTOR Journal Z IF 2011= All citations from Thomsons Reuters journals in 2011 to papers in journal Z Number of citable articles published in journal Z in 2009 & 2010
6. THE IMPACT FACTOR Introduced in 1960’s by Eugene Garfield: ISI 2009 and 2010 2011 IF=5 Articles published in 2009-2010 were cited an average of 5 times in 2011. citations articles
7. HOW THE JIF SHOULD BE USED Wisely! Thomson doesn’t depend on it alone to assess the usefulness of journals so neither should anyone else It should be used with ‘informed peer review’ (lots of things influence citation rates)
8. THREE PROBLEMS Negotiable Irreproducible Not mathematically sound
9. NEGOTIABLE PLoS Medicine, IF 2-11 (8.4) Current Biology IF from 7 to 11 in 2003  Bought by Cell press in 2001
10. NOT REPRODUCIBLE Rockefeller University Press buys their data from TR Up to 19% deviation from published records Second dataset still not correct
11. NOT MATHEMATICALLY SOUND Left-skewed distributions Weak correlation of individual article citation rate with journal IF
12. HOW IS ‘IMPACT’ MEASURED? “My article was published in a journal with an Impact Factor of 3.751” What the …?
13. SO, HOW COULD ‘IMPACT’ BE MEASURED? Where the work is published  JournalRank Citations  scholarly, hyperlinks, social bookmarks Web usage  Publisher platform; 3rd party locations Expert ratings  F1000; Peer Reviewers; Ed Boards etc Community rating & commenting  Digging; Commenting; Rating etc
14. SO, HOW COULD ‘IMPACT’ BE MEASURED? Media/blog coverage  Which sources are considered the most important? Policy development? Who published it?  And where do they work? What did they publish before? How ‘impactful’ are they? Who is talking about it?  And what authority do they have? Who is citing it ?  And what authority do they have?
15. "NOT EVERYTHING THAT CAN BE COUNTED COUNTS, AND NOT EVERYTHING THAT COUNTS CAN BE COUNTED." Albert Einstein
16. SOME SUGGESTIONS
17. WHAT IS A GOOD SCIENTIFIC ARTICLE? Novelty Communication
18. DISTILLATION Before writing ‘distillate’ your results to keep only 2-3 trends that show an advance versus existing knowledge.
19. NOVELTY How to select the new result? Think of: • Initial hypothesis • Hypothesis reformulation • Lab seminar • Meeting poster, oral • Scientists outside your field • Coffee breaks and friends
20. CLEAR If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well. Albert Einstein • Do not make science ‘secret’ • Do not use complicated words to look ‘serious’ • Editors hate abbreviations
21. IMAGES Draw images showing imagination Images communicate 100 times better than text
22. SOCIAL MEDIA Share your findings… And get cited
23. CONCLUSIONS No single ‘perfect’ JIF Objective tools have a role and can contribute to the evaluation of research quality when used appropriately – must be aware of their limitations! More data sources available to rank journals Complementary metrics (usage) should be used and studied further Evaluation: expert peer review complemented by appropriate journal ranking data Ongoing debate….