Love ‘em, hate ’em? It’s hard to ignore them – 2006 journal impact factors were released by Thomson yesterday.
Expect to be bombarded with publishers telling you how much better their journals are than in previous years. I feel a little left out, Nature Nanotechnology won’t get it’s first impact factor until this time next year, until then you’ll just have to take my word that we’re good!
If you care (and have access), check out your favourite journals and how they did at Thomson’s ISI Web of Knowledge, under Journal Citation Reports…
More generally – how important is a journal’s impact factor to you (or your advisor)? Does it influence where you publish, or do only publishers care about these metrics?
Stuart
Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)
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.