Journal Impact Factors are unreliable and may be gamed. But can they still offer value?

Lousy metadata means inaccurate assessment of faculty output. WHOODATHUNKIT.

Move over, publication lists. A new set of online tools are being used to measure academic performance.

Heuristics beat judgment. EVERY DAMN TIME.

Mozilla is signing on to the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC). We believe open data is integral to a healthy Internet — and to a healthy society.

The significance of citations goes far beyond energising and rewarding academic competition. Patrick Dunleavy outlines why citations are so important; from setting up a specialist discourse in an e…

Book offers critique of uses of big data to measure the output of professors and institutions, arguing that technique is equivalent to “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

Over the last decade there has been a quiet revolution in the way academic institutions track and manage their research activity. “Universities have moved from having multiple systems for single purposes, to also having a single system for multiple purposes”, explains Bo Alroe, director, sales enablement for Elsevier’s Pure software. Now used by over 200 […]

Software is a critical part of modern research and yet there is little support across the scholarly ecosystem for its acknowledgement and citation. Inspired by the activities of the FORCE11 working group focused on data citation, this document summarizes the recommendations of the FORCE11 Software Citation Working Group and its activities between June 2015 and April 2016. Based on a review of existing community practices, the goal of the working group was to produce a consolidated set of citation principles that may encourage broad adoption of a consistent policy for software citation across disciplines and venues. Our work is presented here as a set of software citation principles, a discussion of the motivations for developing the principles, reviews of existing community practice, and a discussion of the requirements these principles would place upon different stakeholders. Working examples and possible technical solutions for how these principles can be implemented will be discussed in a separate paper.

The impact factor is academia’s worst nightmare. So much has been written about its flaws, both in calculation and application, that there is little point in reiterating the same tired points here (see here by Stephen Curry for a good starting point). Recently, I was engaged in a conversation on Twitter (story of my life..), with […]

Many studies show that open access (OA) articles—articles from scholarly journals made freely available to readers without requiring subscription fees—are downloaded, and presumably read, more often than closed access/subscription-only articles. Assertions that OA articles are also cited more often generate more controversy. Confounding factors (authors may self-select only the best articles to make OA; absence of an appropriate control group of non-OA articles with which to compare citation figures; conflation of pre-publication vs. published/publisher versions of articles, etc.) make demonstrating a real citation difference difficult. This study addresses those factors and shows that an open access citation advantage as high as 19% exists, even when articles are embargoed during some or all of their prime citation years. Not surprisingly, better (defined as above median) articles gain more when made OA.

Arts and humanities research will be better represented in the 2016-17 global league table

The h-index attempts to measure the productivity and impact of the published work of scholar. But reducing scholarly work to a number in this way has significant limitations. Stacy Konkiel highligh…

In this article we describe another problem with journal impact factors by showing that one journal's impact factor is dependent on other journals' publication delays. The proposed theoretical model ...

The impact factor is a poor measure of a journal's quality, and academics say it should either be overhauled or done away with entirely.