Re: citations as indicators of quality

[Jan Szczepanski <jan.szczepanski@ub.gu.se>]

I recommende everybod to read Geoffrey Crossicks article 
"Journals in the arts and humanities: their role in evaluation" 
in Serials, November 2007 showing that peer-reviewed journals are 
not the self-evident location of choice that they are in 
sciences.

The most presitious form of output in the humanites is still the 
monograph, thematic books, scholarly editions of texts and 
judgment of peers remains the core way to establish the quality 
of research outputs.

What is the impact factor for Plato's The Republic, written 
approxiamtely 360 BC. Still popular, still cited, still an 
extremely important philosophical text.

Jan

Sandy Thatcher wrote:
> But the authors of the article I cited raise a very crucial point in
> demonstrating that citation practices differ across disciplines and
> subfields within disciplines. It surely makes no sense to rank a
> journal higher, or keep subscribing to it, because scholars in that
> subfield, like international relations, simply cite more than their
> colleagues in other subfields. (If this were the main criterion, I
> suppose law journals would always rank highly because they contain
> massive numbers of citations, with many pages having more footnotes
> than text, though of course we all know that they are not really peer
> reviewed, being edited by law students.) This is one among several
> reasons these authors put forward to argue for using reputational
> analysis, too, in order to make up in part for the shortcomings of
> pure citational analysis.
>
> The reductio ad absurdum of citational analysis would be works like
> "The Bell Curve," which received a tremendous amount of attention,
> most of it quite negative, or articles touting "cold fusion," an
> equally controversial topic, or "intelligent design." One would surely
> have to use scare quotes in describing any of these kinds of works as
> having "value."
>
> Sandy Thatcher
> Penn State University Press