Re: WSJ in impact factor

[Brian Simboli <brs4@lehigh.edu>]

Joe,

Your point about page views is very interesting and well-stated 
in below. However, how would page views give an objective 
assessment? Unscrupulous researchers, or their friends, might 
artificially inflate page counts by multiple accesses.

I think citation counts still remain a good way to measure impact 
of research.  However, given the potential abuses of impact 
factors, I'm inclined to think that professional associations 
should play a significant role in interpreting for their members 
appropriate uses of such factors. Also, I'm inclined to think 
that professional associations should work on creating 
disciplinary-specific metrics (including impact factors) for 
their own disciplines, based on data within databases for their 
disciplines (e.g., MathSciNet, or CAS).

This is not to say that ISI data should not also be used, just 
that a clearer or more comprehensive picture of things can be 
obtained by supplementing it with metrics derived from other 
databases. And then there is the question how Google Scholar and 
other publicly accessible citation count sources can figure in 
here. Brian Simboli


Joseph J. Esposito wrote:

> No doubt many of the members of this list will already have seen the
> article in today's Wall St. Journal on "gaming" the impact factor for
> science journals.  As the WSJ site requires a subscription, the link
> is useless, though presumably many on this list have access through
> institutional subscriptions.  The byline is Sharon Begley, the
> headline is:  Science Journals Artfully Try To Boost Their Rankings.
> It is dated June 5 and appears on page B1 of the hardcopy edition (so
> the online citation says).
>
> The gist of the article is that some journals are trying to increase
> their citation count in somewhat devious ways, thus improving their
> impact factor as measured by ISI. I doubt any of this comes as a
> surprise to anyone but a journalist, who, like FEMA, always get to the
> action ten years too late.
>
> What should be clear, however, is that impact factors and ISI's
> unofficial role as umpire for the academy are coming under heavy
> challenges and may indeed be bankrupt.  New measurements are needed,
> but of what kind?  I am myself biased toward page views, which speak
> to readership rather than authorship.  One of the benefits of using
> page views is that there is a huge Internet industry in the consumer
> sector that has already built the tools for counting and auditing page
> views.  I am sure there are other ideas worth considering.
>
> And, yes, this has important implications.  Page views put an emphasis
> on findability, which means more search engine optimization and less
> hierarchical Web site architectures.  Open Access lends itself to
> findability--indeed, it is OA's principal merit.  Page views militate
> against mediating interfaces, whether the portal of a publisher or a
> library.
>
> Universities "in-source" many things and "out-source" others; the
> logic behind some of these decisions is not always self-evident. What
> is truly odd, however, is the outsourcing of the certification process
> to publishers, whether commercial or not-for-profit, leaving ISI to
> stand behind home plate and call the balls and strikes.  Someone who
> wants to transform scholarly communications would start by selecting a
> new umpire.
>
> Joe Esposito