An article on ScienceDaily.com titled “Are Journal Rankings Distorting Science?” posses the question of how science journals are ranked:
The impact factor is a measure of the citations to papers in scientific journals. It was developed as a simple measure of quality and has become a proxy for the importance of a journal to its field.
The article goes on to describe how the British Medical Journal warns this strategy may lead journals to focus more on citations then on science (quality).
All of us in the web world will recognize this “impact factor.” It’s how search engines like Google and Technorati rank the importance of websites. Many in the SEO game have figured out ways to focus more on getting links than on quality. The similarities are very striking.
[via Cognitive Daily]
Tags: Google, Technorati, Science, Journals
2 responses so far ↓
1 Mark // Mar 19, 2007 at 5:50 am
I think that as long as the journal review process is done by humans, who need to physically read/review each paper before publishing, it’s on another level as compared with increasing internet page ranks with links, the difference being that in the journal publishing world, citations to their publication can not be created by the authors. If the journal publication world becomes completely web-based, then it might be a problem.
2 Josh Kenzer // Mar 19, 2007 at 6:15 am
Mark, very good point. I wonder if the future of the journal publication world is headed online or if there will always be the element of paper delivery.
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