Citation in Science - Don't Quote Me on That: topic
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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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Replies
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It looks a really impressive piece of work, Pierre. I am afraid I am not able to work out how to customise it, but that’s my ignorance. Perhaps at the moment it is oriented to people who understand things like code, and not for people like me who aren’t so clever and need instructions!
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Sorry Maxine, this is again another one of those geeky-command-line-tools loved by the bioinformaticians
:-)
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Oh wow, I love those top two screenshots! Takes me back to those ms dos days!
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All very interesting to journal editors I expect, but nothing whatsoever to do with science.
I had a quick look at the ranking of neuroscience journals on eigenfactor.org and only two of the top nine contain any original science at all, The rest are reviews.
From the point of view of the practising scientist, this is just a time-wasting game (but a game with the potential to harm science if anyone were to take it seriously).
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What about the practicing scientist who is trying to decide where to submit a paper? Or the practicing scientist who has been asked to write a review article and wants to know about the journal, eg its readership?
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Well, one of the best known things about bibliometrics is that there is no detectable correlation between the number of citations that a paper gets and the impact factor of the journal in which it is published. The rational scientist, therefore, will nor waste time agonising about which journal to choose. That being said, I have to agree that there are plenty of scientists who behave irrationally when it comes to this sort of choice.
The fact that hardly anybody scans paper journals these days makes this more true than at any tine in the past. You do a subject search and see what comes up. Where it is published has never been less important.
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I think your points are correct, David.
But I do know that practising scientists who are deciding where to submit their research, and whether to write an invited review, want to know the IF of the journal—irrational as that may be. What do to about that dichotomy? -
What this is all moving towards, at least in my mind, is a per-article metric instead of a per-journal metric, which could vastly improve science if everyone were to take a proper implementation seriously and use it.
Everyone knows that journal editors and reviewers are overworked, especially the people at the top tier journals. This overworking is responsible for the, at times, shallow and unhelpful reviews of manuscripts, and it’s also a major reason that doctored or fraudulent data slips past the people who are supposed to catch it.
If we had a metric per-article, the incentive to submit to the high IF journals would decrease, and the burden of reviewing would be spread more evenly across journals. It might even be to your advantage to submit to a smaller circulation journal, if you knew you were more likely to get a higher number of citations or downloads per number of subscribers or dollar spent on subscription fees.
Reviewers could take more time per article, so the reviews would be better and more thoughtful, and that could only help science out overall.
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