Good intro to JIF and gaming it.

Good piece for Scholarly Reputation Week.

Discusses Eugene Garfield and his "core journals" TOC concept.

Previous work indicates that over the past 20 years, the highest quality work have been published in an increasingly diverse and larger group of journals. In this paper we examine whether this...

MLA's documentation on how to evaluate humanists for T&P.

Having first documented the large-scale demise of the impact factor as a predictor of quality research, George Lozano and team examined whether this pattern also applies to the handful of elite jou…

A study providing new insights into the citation boost from open data has been released in preprint form on PeerJ by Dryad researchers Heather Piwowar and Todd Vision. The researchers looked at tho…

I just read this paper, written by Björn Brembs and Marcus Munafò and entitled “Deep Impact: Unintended consequences of journal rank”. It was recently posted on the Computer Science arX…

Charleston Conference talk on Article-Level Metrics and altmetrics for publishers and librarians.

Well-supported, somewhat contrarian view of OA choices and bibliometrics, and how they impact developing nations. Often hard to find this kind of discourse!

The growing business of self-published books has spawned an industry in which hired reviewers produce favorable online reviews.

Good IF-problems overview from the POV of a working scholar.

My 'Sick of Impact Factors' blog post seems to have struck much more of a chord than I anticipated. At the time of writing it has attracted over 12,900 page vi

Why impact factor sucks.

Despite a “Cambrian” explosion in the number of citation metrics used(Van Noorden, 2010), the impact factor (IF) of a journal remains a decisive factor ofchoice when publishing your ultimate research results and evaluating researchproductivity. Most other citation metrics correlate with the IF and there is little doubtthat they reflect the overall impact of different journals. However, there is good reason tobe more cautious about IF judgements.First, the distribution of the number of citations per paper (NCPP) within a journalis heavily skewed. A few highly-cited papers often account for a significant amount of thetotal citation count of a journal (25 % of the papers in Nature account for 89 % of the IF“Not-so-deep impact”, 2005) and a recent report highlighted that even a single article candramatically bias the IF of a small journal (Dimitrov, Kaveri, & Bayry, 2010). The meanNCPP, as captured with the IF, should therefore never be used. A more appropriatemeasure is the median NCPP. Figure 1 (left) plots the median of the total NCPP againstthe mean, for three potential publication outlets for psychologists; Psychological Review(IF2009=9.1), Nature (IF2009=34.5) and Psychological Science (IF2009=5.1), for differentyears (data compiled from ISI Web of Knowledge). Nature follows a distinct trend whencompared to specialist journals: the median seems independent from its mean. Thisapparent dissociation results from the skew of the citation distribution observed inNature, in wh...

Presented below are remarks prepared for a meeting of Indiana University Bloomington (IUB) Department Chairs and Academic Associate Deans hosted by the IUB Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty an…

Nature runs an anti-IF editorial with a big fat "look at our awesome IF!" ad above it.