Posted by Olive Heffernan on behalf of Gian-Reto Walther
Wasn’t it surprising how the media communicated the findings of the latest IPCC reports? Who would have expected that each of the three reports would produce front-page stories and dominate the public discussion for a considerable while. Whereas for previous issues of IPCC reports, the focus of the reporting media was usually set on the remaining uncertainties of the IPCC statements, this time the (still remaining, though smaller) uncertainties were virtually ignored.
In contrast, a competition among media reports was launched exacerbating the consequences of climate change, one overbidding the other. The logical consequence of this is that sooner or later we end up at a point which cannot be topped. Where to go from there? The answer is what we are just experiencing now. The same media (in part the same journalists) announcing ‘the end of the world’ on the title page (see the article in DER SPIEGEL) a few months later go for the opposite, blaming ‘climate hysteria’ and providing a platform to those who didn’t get their word in the discussion so far. The effect is always the same: The headline is assured, the paid circulation again high, and the public remains confused and can’t really do anything with the progress of scientific knowledge.
The role of scientists is not neutral in this discussion. It is too tempting to provide the media with provocative statements. Only the ‘expert’ with the most spectacular message attracts the attention. For the privilege to appear in public, scientific facts are not clearly separated from expectations, but often intermixed. Minor uncertainties are reported only to avoid describing major ones (BioScience 57(3), 227-236, 2007).
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Please! Do we have to do this every year.
Impact Factors might be a worthwhile measure if you are comparing two or more journals covering the same subject range and with the same range of content (i.e. primary research, reviews, opinions, commentary etc.). Otherwise the variations caused by discipline and publication type are too great for the relative ‘worth’ of the journals to shine through.
Worse yet the distribution of citations within a journal is governed by a power law rather than a normal distribution: a very few papers attract most citations, most papers attract a very few citations. This means that the Impact Factor of the journal has insignificant power to predict the number of citations garnered by any individual paper within the journal.
The sooner we stop playing this stupid game and devise better ways of assessing scientific output the better.
Talking IFs is all very well and good providing your journal is performing well! And sorry that this is going to have to be an anonymous posting – but I fear for my safety!
I see that Angewandte Chemie already has a news item up touting their greater than 10 impact factor. I don’t mind a journal doing that necessarily, but it lacks a bit of class to specifically name your competitors (and their impact factors) and essentially gloat.
I’m eagerly awaiting the news item on the Advanced Materials homepage about their new impact factor, although I think it may be a while before we see that since theirs went down over a full point…
Oh well, I guess the previous comments have it right… if you have a good impact factor, then impact factors are great – if you have a poor one, then either you treat them like your strange uncle and never mention them, or spend your time pointing out that they are meaningless. Remember – you can prove anything with statistics!
One point worth considering in this discussion is how scientists get connected with what they read. It has been some years since I regularly browsed journals in a library and I now have a number of current awareness searches (both keyword and citation) that run automatically on a weekly basis. It could be argued that the widespread use of on-line searching (and browsing) makes impact factors much less relevant. I certainly don’t take account of impact factors in assessing individual articles since even a high impact factor is no guarantee against SRS (slumbering referee syndrome). There is plenty of material out there of a value that is primarily calorific!
That said, when I do publish it is one of a fairly small set of journals. There is less pressure to publish journal articles in industry (as Marie Antoinette may have said, “Let them read patents”). On occasion, I’ve opted for a less prestigious journal because it looked there would be less hassle. It’s worth remembering that a lot of industrial publications emerge some time after the event and this will influence where the work gets submitted.
I found this nice post on Bexquisite’s Blog. It may be about Impact Factors:
Or it might be about something completely different.