Replies

Results

• 11

  Maxine Clarke

  01 October 2008 | 07:34

  [ Permalink ]

  David – as noted above in the post, I heard about the meeting by email yesterday in a list of similar meetings. I will provide more details of the programme when I get them.

  Austin – I can attest that you are by no means alone in having calculated your own h index! (I read the discussion on Brian’s blog and indeed have linked to it somewhere on this forum I believe.)

  Clearly, this is a publisher’s meeting so they are interested in metrics from the journal “measurement” perspective. They aren’t coming at the question from the angle David has so eloquently described (eg in the Citation in Science evening at the BL that forms the basis for this NN group) of academic assessment commmittees, in which “reading the papers” is the recommended approach by David and many others.

  Of course as I and many others have stated, impact measures of journals are intrinsically flawed as they currently stand, because only a small number of papers acquire many citations, even in the “high impact” journals such as Nature, Science and Cell.

  Journals and publishers do like to have ways to assess themselves, though. And I think the day will be an interesting one, in that it will consist (I presume) of people from these various organisations pitching their own systems and discussing viable (and not so viable!) alternatives to the IF. I am particularly interested in Scimago, as that seems to be a composite of various existing metrics. (And it is free, Austin and others, if you want to try it out.)

• 12

  Iain Craig

  01 October 2008 | 11:41

  [ Permalink ]

  As the chair of this meeting I’m suitably encouraged that there has been so much debate in response to the first announcement. Further details will be posted on the ALPSP website in the next couple of weeks, along with booking information. In the meantime, let me describe why ALPSP is holding such a meeting in the first place, and give you some information on the speakers.

  It’s clear to everybody that there has been a proliferation of metrics, each with the aim of quantifying the quality of a journal, or an individual, or research group, or institution, or country. Mostly these are metrics based on citation statistics, manipulated in a variety of simple or exotic fashions. The history of such metrics is rich in the literature stretching back decades, but with the increasing ease of availability of data, the rate of new-metric production has surged in recent years. However, what has largely been absent, is a sensible discussion as to whether any of these metrics provides new insight, or whether they are just slightly different flavours of the same fundamental measure.

  Although it is not publishers who create these metrics, we are affected by them because our authors are influenced by them, because their funding agencies are influenced by them. To quote a colleague, “the new frontier of impact metrics is like the wild west”. The goal of the seminar is to examine a variety of these metrics (and the data sources that are used to form them) from a scientific perspective, and to have a sensible discussion about what these metrics can, and cannot, bring to the table. I encourage publishers and non-publishers alike to attend, the wider the conversation the better.

  The line-up of the seminar is not yet complete, but the following speakers will be in attendance:

  Lutz Bornmann, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
  Johan Bollen, MESUR Project, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos USA.
  Chris Armbruster, Research Network 1989; Max Planck Society, Berlin, Germany.
  Jonathan Adams , Evidence, Leeds, UK

  As you can see, we have a wide range of backgrounds, covering both citation and usage(download) metrics, plus we will cover the use of citation metrics in research policy evaluation (the RAE/REF). More speakers will be added in due course, and the day will end with a panel discussion involving all the speakers.

  As I said earlier, all this will appear on the ALPSP website in due course, but if you do wish to register your interest now, you can e-mail Diane French from ALPSP: info@alpsp.com.

• 13

  Dov Henis

  18 June 2009 | 06:00

  [ Permalink ]

  Journal Impact Factor
  = measure of the citations to science and social science journals

  JIF is regarded as “the science of rating scientists and their research”

  What does JIF have to do with “the science of rating scientists and their research”?

  This is another glaring sad example of the prostituting, by the sience establishment guild of the 20th century Technology Culture, of the terms science, scientist and research.

  I am asked if I have a better suggestion on how to rate scientists and research.

  I do not pretend to have any suggestion on how now to scientifically rate scientists and research.

  The present science establishment is, IMO, widely-deeply cancered with the malignant 20th century Technology Culture, of which public rating is one symptom. Tackling only this one single symptom would be a very difficult task.

  My most probably hopeless approach is to stir the stagnant water and initiate evolutionary changes that would eventually re-place science, scientists and research where Western culture departed from Enlightenment circa 100 years ago, when it dealt with the essence of nature and life evolutions, and elected to become a pierced-ear slave (Ex.21, 6) to the Technology Culture .

  IMO it is vitally important for now charting the course of our society to learn and understand, to analyse and assess, with a scientism perspective, the evolution and collapse of the Technology Culture and the implications, within it, of the bare survival of basic classical science, of the further comprehension of our place and fate in the universe.

  Respectfully suggesting,

  Dov Henis
  (Comments From The 22nd Century)
  Updated Life’s Manifest May 2009
  http://www.physforum.com/index.php?showtopic=14988&st=495&#entry412704

Results