Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: Impact factors: they only mean what they mean These days there is a lot of misunderstanding of scientometrics and we often see a confusion of the research with its indicators. Science ministries and university administrators try to push their country’s or institution’s “research impact ” by telling researchers to increase numeric figures that were invented as proxies for later assessment. In obvious juxtaposition to common sense this even leads to direct orders to postdocs “to only publish in high impact journals ” and not to engage in other important activities scientists of well-rounded stature will routinely perform, like publication in medium impact journals of their immediate field, in startup journals, in conference proceedings, of book chapters, as grey literature or intended for dissemination to the general public, reviewing, editing, writing blogs etc. Of course, due to the competition for space and recognition the journal impact is an indicator of high quality of an article, but much less so than often reflected in the career determining decisions that are rightly criticized in the San Francisco Declaration On Research Assessment (DORA, 2013) and in a recent editorial in Science (Albert, 2013). With online publishing article impact now gets more and more dissociated from journal impact (empirically shown, see Lozano, Lariviere, and Gingras, 2012), because readers can directly find and download the unit of interest: an article rather than a whole issue or a book chapter rather than a whole book. However, while in the past
Source: KOPS (University of Konstanz)
Authors: Ulf‐Dietrich Reips, Uwe Matzat
Language: English
Subfield: Library and Information Sciences
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2158546899