Sorting pubmed articles on the impact factor
Pierre Lindenbaum
Wednesday, 18 June 2008 14:03 UTC
Hi all,
We recently had an interesting discussion on friendfeed about how it would be possible to order the articles in pubmed using the impact factor of their journals as a key of sorting
Lars Juhl Jensen and Deepak Singh suggested me to have a look at http://www.eigenfactor.org where the Eigenfactor is a measure of the journal’s total importance to the scientific community. I then wrote a tool sorting the articles in pubmed using this score.
See here for more information.
Pierre
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Hi Aaron
I cited that article mostly because it was the first one that came to mind in a field with which I’m familiar, I’m sure there are “better” examples.
Your point is a good one though, the impact of this paper is definitely spread across a number of publications over several years (decades even). However, this article in particular is described by the authors themselves as the pivotal finding/publication in the discovery of the Ubiquitin-proteasome system, which eventually led to the Nobel a few years back. It’s published in what would be considered a solid, but low IF, journal and did not receive a flood of citations relative to it’s importance. Over it’s ~30 year lifespan, 253 citations is only an average of around 8 citations per year.
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Darren,
Thanks for your reply. If you don’t mind, I’d like to iterate once more on this. I’m interested in phenomenon of a fundamental breakthrough being made but the general scientific community not readily understanding the implications of that breakthrough. Maybe this is what happened in the case of the paper you reference. In other words, could the problem have been that the ramifications of the existence of the Ubiquitin-proteasome system were lost upon the average researcher toiling away in his/her specialized branch of the scientific tree until more applied studies were done showing more clearly the relevance of the discovery to those not intimately familiar with the work that led up to the discovery.Perhaps another example of this is Kary Mullis’ discovery of the polymerase chain-reaction. Although the blockbuster PCR paper came out in 1988 (and has since been cited over 14,000 times), Mullis, prior to 1988, had put out five PCR-related papers which eventually would rack up over 12,000 citations as a group. The interesting thing is that leading up to 1988, the five papers had received, as a group, a total of only 79 citations. In 1988, the year the blockbuster paper was published, those five papers, in a single year, chalked up 339 citations. Could it be that although Mullis had been publishing on PCR-related science for three years, it took the 1988 paper to make accessible to the mainstream research community the PCR line of investigation in such a way that the impact of the work could begin registering bibliometrically?
Aaron
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Another point is that papers cited a lot tend to be skewed towards methodological reports compared with conceptual advances (which as some people in this thread are writing, sometimes take time to be appreciated as such). There is quite a bit of other discussion in this forum on these topics, if anyone wants to scroll down the list of topics on its main page. There’s also a link to a very good, open-access, “Theme” set of articles by various well-known writers, airing some of these issues in more detail.
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