15 A recent editorial in Science from Kai Simons evaluates the short comings of impact factors on journals and asks (rhetorically, I hope) why we even bother to care about impact factors at all. It’s a lot of words written sort of boringly and you can read them here but the fundamental point Kai was making was that journals are hijacking the process by stuffing review articles into their pages which are natural bait for citations. Is this good? Blah. Who gives a fuck. That’s hardly interesting.
I was more interested in his rhetorical question – why it is that we care about impact factors. You see, I’ve always loved scales and numbers and charts and figures. When I was 15 someone purchased a copy of the 1996 World Factbook for me and, to every one’s horror, I had memorized most of it. Numbers and rankings are all very fascinating to me, even when they’re attributed to something as prosaic as the annual production of rice by tonnage or total arable landmass by country.
I think most of us share this fascination with data and numbers and rankings. Quantification is, after all, our business. Thus is it surprising that we measure a scientist’s worth by his or her H index? We simply measure everything. We measure so many things I wonder if many of the things we do measure should be measured in the first place. Not out of any ethical concern, but because it’s so damn pseudo scientific.
I’ve struggled to properly attribute a quote, which I think was by Goethe but I could be mistaken, so I’ll paraphrase: When one takes a phenomenon and attributes a scale to it, they invariably replace the beauty and nature of the phenomenon with the rigor and nature of the scale.
So it can be said about all these things – these numbers. The truth is, when it comes to H index, impact factors, school rankings, and (especially) IQs, the scale that we so often use to quantify whatever it is we are measuring is far more limited in scope and concept than the object we are trying to measure. In the end, we have attributed a number that is infinitely less significant and far less meaningful than what we were measuring in the first place!
To make the whole situation worse, the scale can be manipulated anyway. As Kai pointed out, impact factors can be increased by fluffing a journal up with review articles. H factors can be fluffed by gratuitous self citation. School rankings, IQs and essentially any other “metric” associated with a measure more complex than total tonnage of rice produced by a given country can be manipulated by careful tweaking of the variables and parameters (even if it comes at the real expense of the quality of the item the scale was supposed to measure!). What do you get? You get a person, a journal or a department that is quantifiably the best at fucking with the outcome of a scale.
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Even I have my own little metric, hotcites: http://www.hotcites.com
yeah, and my h-bar index.
God damn it, Krugman won the nobel prize.
Nowhere before has there been such an acute case of apoplithorismophobia. THIS should be required reading. It’s practically written at a 10th grade level, you should be embarassed if you don’t understand it:
http://www.qjae.org/journals/q.....e6_4_2.pdf
Deliberately inflating the currency to combat the false boogeyman of deflation essentially incrementally steals the value of money from everyone and redistributes it to the rich or connected. And we wonder why there’s a growing divide between rich and poor in the US with perpetual inflation in the 10~15% range and a Federal reserve that no longer tracks the M3 money supply.
Well, its not really a Nobel if that helps. He won the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”. The Nobel organisation omits the title and calls it the “Prize in Economics” as opposed to the “Nobel prize in …”
Pedantic, but it might be helpful at a trivia night.
At least we don’t measure with the purpose to scale what we REALLY want to scale, although we still do it badly but much better than before. And contrary to not to measure at all, only by keep measuring, innovatively perhaps, can we measure things better. More new maths is constantly needed.
A Nobel Intent essay argued that
I think in essence this author, and we as well, are arguing new maths instead of no maths.
To be honest, in my own field, I don’t care for impact factors because I already know who has the biggest impact. That’s the point; you don’t need to know impact factors for people in your field. You already know their impact through the details of their work.
When it comes to institutes and funding organization however, they need to know who’s more impact in many different fields of study, and there is no one who can be as informed in all other field as in “his/her” field.
As Kai pointed out, impact factors can be increased by fluffing a journal up with review articles
Death to Angewandte!
Review articles are the bomb diggity. They are so useful to grad students that journals SHOULD be rewarded for printing them.
Are you done losing the election yet? You can’t talk about chemistry until you finish losing the election.
Leave him alone. He couldn’t even get an endorsement from Ron Paul.
California is exponentially enrichening with tenebrous diversity’s hyperabundant get. The state has conceptually rediagnosticated standardized achievement evaluation via legislated compassionate tolerence of heteronormality,
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/belled.htm
Intelligence is remarkably difficult to counterfeit… even when heteronormatism problematizes homosocial othering. Perhaps California should dynamically evaluate a student enculturalization impact index.
As a graduate student i must say that Review articles are THE worst thing you could read. F-them. Sci-Finder said molecule and skim (and i do mean skim) the money reaction or study for the first 15 years of publications. Ask yourself about 5 questions and then go to the last five years of publications and skim thru those.
Often times, a collection of 2-3 papers written by critical-thinking professors will tell you so much more about the subject/ issue than any “review” article will.
Very true, though you may have to actually go back and read some of their citations if you’re relatively new to the topic. Tough, ain’t it?
As a graduate student, I couldn’t disagree more. I don’t know which review articles you have been reading, but most of the ones I read give me a good and clear overview of a research field or subfield in which I wouldn’t go out of my way to read the actual papers themselves. Also ‘Sci-Finder said molecule’ and ‘ask yourself 5 questions’ raises a whole number of red flags on your review article views.
Even in my research field in which I read all the papers at some point, some review articles are so well written and include everything, that I just refer back to them when I need to remember who did something and when and whether what I’m doing now has been done before.
Besides, when you get to the ‘writing your thesis’ part, you’re going to be so, so sorry you every dissed review articles. Better apologize now before it’s too late.