O'Really?

[This post is part of an ongoing series about impact factors]

The latest results from the annual impact factor boxing world championship contest are out. This is a combat sport where scientific journals are scored according to their supposed influence and impact in Science. This years competition rankings include the first-ever update to the newly introduced Five Year Impact Factor and Eigenfactor™ Metrics [1,2] in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) on the Web (see www.isiknowledge.com/JCR warning: clunky website requires subscription*), presumably in response to widespread criticism of impact factors. The Eigenfactor™ seems to correlate quite closely with the impact factor scores, both of which work at the level of the journal, although they use different methods for measuring a given journals impact. However, what many authors are often more interested in is the impact of an individual article, not the journal where it was published. So it would be interesting to see how the figures below tally with Google Scholar, see also comments by Abhishek Tiwari. I’ve included a table below of bioinformatics impact factors, updated for June 2009. Of course, when I say 2009 (today), I mean 2008 (these are the latest figures available based on data from 2007) – so this shiny new information published this week is already out of date [3] and flawed [4,5] but here is a selection of the data anyway: [update: see figures published in June 2010.]

The internet is radically changing the way we communicate and this includes scientific publishing, as media mogul Rupert Murdoch once pointed out big will not beat small any more – it will be the fast beating the slow.  An interesting question for publishers and scientists is, how can the Web help the faster flyweight and featherweight boxers (smaller journals) compete and punch-above-their-weight with the reigning world champion heavyweights (Nature, Science and PNAS)? Will the heavyweight publishers always have the killer knockout punches? If you’ve got access to the internet, then you already have a ringside seat from which to watch all the action. This fight should be entertaining viewing and there is an awful lot of money riding on the outcome [6-11].

Seconds away, round two…

References

1. Fersht, A. (2009). The most influential journals: Impact Factor and Eigenfactor Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106 (17), 6883-6884 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0903307106
2. Bergstrom, C., & West, J. (2008). Assessing citations with the Eigenfactor Metrics Neurology, 71 (23), 1850-1851 DOI: 10.1212/01.wnl.0000338904.37585.66
3. Cockerill, M. (2004). Delayed impact: ISI’s citation tracking choices are keeping scientists in the dark. BMC Bioinformatics, 5 (1) DOI: 10.1186/1471-2105-5-93
4. Allen, L., Jones, C., Dolby, K., Lynn, D., & Walport, M. (2009). Looking for Landmarks: The Role of Expert Review and Bibliometric Analysis in Evaluating Scientific Publication Outputs PLoS ONE, 4 (6) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0005910
5. Grant, R.P. (2009) On article-level metrics and other animals Nature Network
6. Corbyn, Z. (2009) Do academic journals pose a threat to the advancement of Science? Times Higher Education
7. Fenner, M. (2009) PLoS ONE: Interview with Peter Binfield Gobbledygook blog at Nature Network
8. Hoyt, J. (2009) Who is killing science on the Web? Publishers or Scientists? Mendeley Blog
9. Hull, D. (2009) Escape from the Impact Factor: The Great Escape? O’Really? blog
10. Murray-Rust, P. (2009) THE article: Do academic journals pose a threat to the advancement of science? Peter Murray-Rust’s blog: A Scientist and the Web
11. Wu, S. (2009) The evolution of Scientific Impact shirleywho.wordpress.com

* This important data should be freely available (e.g. no subscription), since crucial decisions about the allocation of public money depend on it, but that’s another story.

[More commentary on this post over at friendfeed. CC-licensed Fight Night Punch Test by djclear904]