RE: Measuring citations

[Sandy Thatcher <sandy.thatcher@alumni.princeton.edu>]

How about developing a metric for the impact of individual 
articles? That, ultimately, is what counts in academe.

Sandy Thatcher


>Readers of the list may be interested to know that the Journal
>Usage Factor (JUF) Project, sponsored by UKSG, RIN and a number
>of publishers, is investigating the feasibility of developing and
>implementing a sustainable, statistically robust, usage-based
>measure of the impact of journals. The latest phase of this
>project, a detailed statistical analysis of the usage of 150,000
>articles from over 300 COUNTER-compliant journals across five
>broad subject fields, has just been completed and the results are
>very promising indeed. The report of this phase of the JUF
>project will be published in early July on the COUNTER and UKSG
>websites (www.projectCOUNTER.org) and (www.uksg.org), where
>background information on the project may already be found. Among
>the recommendations contained in the report will be a proposed
>methodology for calculating the JUF. The project has also
>addressed likely gaming scenarios and make proposals for dealing
>with these.
>
>Hazel