Does research need new measuring sticks? The Nature Network group Citation in Science hopes to find common ground among researchers, funders, information providers and others concerning the measures of research output.
Allan Sudlow of the British Library lists common ways in which citations are manipulated or otherwise abused. ‘The art of counting’, a post by Nature Publishing Group product developer Ian Mulvany, is a useful account of how the impact factor and the H-index are calculated, and concludes that there are many growing areas of contribution such as blogs and open data sets that, at present, are ignored by such metrics. Another post explores whether the number of times an article is downloaded from the Internet could be more informative than its citation counts.
Biologist David Colquhoun of University College London argues that publication metrics are inappropriate for assessing people: “The pressure to produce cheap headline-grabbing work will be enormous. The long-term reputation of UK science will surely be damaged by this sort of bean-counting approach.”
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From the blogosphere
An archive of the "From the Blogosphere" column on the Authors page in Nature, highlighting nature.com blog posts of interest to scientists in their role as authors and peer-reviewers. We welcome comments and suggestions.
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Citation in science -- 12 June 2008
- Date:
- Thursday, 12 Jun e 2008 - 13:59 UTC
Last updated: Thursday, 12 Jun 2008 - 13:59 UTC
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Comments
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I really ought to get involved there. I just need to find the time. At the moment I only visit NN to prevaricate, between reading and revising manuscripts.
Yes, I know what you mean, Bob. It is an important subject but time is short. Because of the constraints of the print medium (this blog is an archive of a column I write to print deadlines), a lot has gone on in the forum since I wrote this post.
Your Connotea tag (Impact Factor) is a very useful resource, thanks for that. I’ve promoted it to a noticeboard entry in the forum. We’ve had another contribution of a Connotea library, from William Gunn, since then.
I’m still prevaricating (responding to comments from referees, who are happy to inform us that a section is unclear, but do not see any necessity to explain why).
Anyway, this would be one area where something more solid like a wiki would be useful, so that we can have everything in one place, and update it as we go on. I wonder if Matt is listening. :-)
Connotea itself has a wiki option for users, Bob, see here, I made one myself when the facility was first introduced, see here. Do you think it would be a suitable place to create a citation wiki? If so, we can provide the link via a noticeboard entry here in this group. Can you explain a bit more what you would want it to do (compared with this NN group?)
Sorry for not getting back earlier – I’ve been all over the place the last couple of weeks.
I think Connotea would be ideal. One problem with the group is that links and other bits and pieces appear on different topics, so it’s difficult to keep track. A wiki could at as an aggregator. It might also be a good place to summarise the large number of papers in the list I put up.
OK, Bob, thanks, I’ll talk to the British Library team about the idea. Are you coming to the Science Blogging meeting? That might be an opportunity to
pevaricate furtherscope it.I’ll be there – I think I just promised to throw peanuts at Grrlscientist.
And I’m always up for a spot of prevarication.
Good, I’ll look forward to seeing you — and hope that you’ve used up all the peanuts by then.