Journal's Impact Factor

[Newbies_Kid]

Do you have any opinion on this? I think impact factor is a something unfair because article is judge on the number of citation but not on it's quality.

[ajb]

I think what you said is right, but how would one judge the quality of a journal and maybe more importantly an individual paper?

 

The other point is that some subject areas get more citations. Medical and biological journals tend to have IF's vastly higher than say mathematics. Mathematical articles may also take many years to be cited.

 

IF's maybe an ok way to judge journals in the same field, but cannot be used to judge journals across fields nor really an individual paper.

 

The important thing when submitting a paper is to pick a suitable journal, I think everyone has made some mistakes here, I know I have.

[timo]

Newbies_kid: I think, the whole reason for taking citations as a measure is that no one has yet devised a better measure of "quality". I sure agree that it is a dubious measure, but it is also not exactly fair to say one should instead look at quality when you cannot even define what quality is.

[Newbies_Kid]

Yes, i agree with both of you. But because the impact factor calculation is a mean, it doesn't means all papers have same number of citations. Like my friend's paper have 4 citations and mine still zero, but when it comes to IF, both of us will have IF of 2. In future, the citations of my friend's paper will keep increase (because of its quality) and mine will maintain zero (noob paper) but nevertheless, our IF is still equal..

Edited October 9, 2011 by Newbies_Kid

[ajb]

Only one of my preprints has so far had a citation in a published paper. Hopefully this will grow.

[CharonY]

Newbies_kid: I think, the whole reason for taking citations as a measure is that no one has yet devised a better measure of "quality". I sure agree that it is a dubious measure, but it is also not exactly fair to say one should instead look at quality when you cannot even define what quality is.

 

 

 

This is precisely the point. I also want to mention that there are different measures being thrown around in this thread. One being the impact factor, which is a measure of the journal, not the individual works, and the number of citations in a given paper.. It is generally accepted that comparisons are only valid (if at all) in a specific field. And finally there are also measures that are based on the publications of a given author (most notably the Hirsch-index).

 

So the goal is to measure quality of a journal, of an individual paper and of an individual author. But yes, the overall problem is how to measure quality in research as a whole, which is a giant can of worms in its own right.