Are comments unfair citation boosts or reader service?
Maxine Clarke
Tuesday, 28 October 2008 15:23 UTC
Sara Fletcher draws attention to this Guardian article, published 28 October.
Although it makes some reasonable points, the piece is also a mish-mash of logical flaws and bias (eg only two people are interviewed to represent scientific research and publishing, respectively: an anthropologist and a community manager for an open access publisher), as well as confounding ‘open access’ with ‘online publication’, and so on. Without wishing to get into all that here as many of these points have been extensively discussed previously, there was one paragraph in particular that struck me:
A journal called Behavioral and Brain Sciences has come up with a nifty way of boosting its impact factor – how often authors in it are cited. It now identifies a ‘target article’, and then commissions a dozen comments to appear alongside it, giving the article 12 citations directly on publication.
This is one spin on what the journal is doing – a a spin that suits the Guardian journalist’s purpose. Another interpretation might be that readers benefit from these various perspectives (perhaps at least some of them are peer-reviewers’ reports), and they are far from being devious attempts at self-citation. Does ISI web of knowledge even count these comments as citations? I have an idea they don’t. You won’t find out any answers from this one-sided Guardian piece, as they don’t seem to have bothered to ask the journal for a response, or to have checked with Thomson Reuters.
Updated 28 October 2008 15:24 UTC
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Replies
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I too was rather taken aback by the article. It was not at all balanced and represents a (to me) skewed view of the literature and search tools. It was worthy of the worst of our tabloid papers.
BUT … it is good sometimes to be challenged in this way and to realise that there are people who see Google Scholar as the ultimate search tool, and Digg as the best way to find related work. A little while back Anna’s piece about PubMed made me realise that it was unwise to be complacent and that my perceptions of usefulness and effectiveness of search tools may not be universally shared.
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Plus it’s worth noting, I think, that comment articles can get citations themselves, which potentially takes citations from the original paper:
e.g. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v414/n6866/full/414857a.htmlThe comment probably draws more attention to it though, so it’s not just stealing references from the original paper, but I suspect it won’t much affect the impact factor of the journal as a whole. Flicking through a few N&V also suggests that the rate of comment citation is not all that high.
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