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Category Archives: Citation analysis

Impact Factor shock horror…!

Written on October 30, 2014 at 2:55 pm, by

If Impact Factors are not a good proxy for assessing the performance of publishing authors then what are they good for? If you plot out the number of citations received by a given journal over a specific period of time then you end up with a distribution that is severely skewed to the right. It Read more...

Do metrics have a future?

Written on May 20, 2013 at 3:44 pm, by

The publication of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment provides a welcome point of focus from which to debate the value of metrics that attempt to measure the volume and quality contributions made to scientific progress by a country, funding agency, institution or individual researcher. A major stimulus for this multi-publisher/agency review was the Read more...

eLife: Nothing new under the eSun?

Written on February 28, 2013 at 4:05 pm, by

I did my PhD at UCL in the early seventies when neuroscience was only just beginning to exist as a subject in its own right. It wasn’t until 1980 that the first neuroscience department was established in the UK, so to do neuroscience I had to spend most of my time hopping between the physiology Read more...

PLoS article level metrics

Written on February 25, 2013 at 3:37 pm, by

PLoS publishes a regular report covering a wide range of metrics covering all of it journals. This is easy to download as a .csv file, from which you can quickly start to create graphical summaries using Excel or STATA. One problem with the way the data is currently presented is that each number represents a Read more...

Mapping Social Sciences publishers

Written on February 15, 2013 at 2:25 pm, by

There is an increasing amount of data about STM publishing available freely on the web. Publisher/imprint/journal/ISSN relationships as developed for Elsevier’s Scopus database can be found here. Publicly accessible resources derived from Scopus and Thomson Reuter’s Web of Science can be viewed at Scimago and Eigenfactor. Scimago is especially useful as it contains journal statistics Read more...

Do major funding agencies support better research?

Written on January 23, 2013 at 12:54 pm, by

Too many US authors of the most innovative and influential papers in the life sciences do not receive NIH funding, conclude Joshua M. Nicholson and John P. A. Ioannidis in a recent issue of Nature. The authors concluded that three out of five of a carefully selected sample of highly cited principal investigators eligible for Read more...

Scientific publishing goes “Boink”

Written on January 9, 2013 at 11:49 am, by

A simplified picture of the scientific research process would include a cycle of events beginning with the identification of a new idea or hypothesis (A “known unknown” after Donald Rumsfeld’s definition) derived from a gap analysis of the literature, followed by competitive peer review of the corresponding research proposal and the release of funding and Read more...

Mistakes happen: but they need to be corrected more rapidly

Written on September 20, 2012 at 12:13 pm, by

“There is increasing unrest in global science. The number of retractions is rising, new examples of poor oversight or practice are being uncovered and anxiety is building among researchers.”  Thus spoke Jim Woodgett in a recent article published in Nature’s Worldview section, concluding that, although most mistakes are unintentional, there needs to be much greater  Read more...