O'Really?

June 29, 2012

Impact Factor Boxing 2012

Filed under: publishing,Science — Duncan Hull @ 7:28 am
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Rocky Balboa Philadelphia, PA

Rocky Balboa, Philadelphia, PA. Creative Commons licensed picture by seng1011 (steve eng) on Flickr.

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

In the world of abused performance metrics, the impact factor is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the (publishing) world.

It has been an eventful year in the boxing ring of scientific publishing since the last set of figures were published by Thomson-Reuters. A brand new journal called PeerJ launched with a radical publish ’til you perish business model [1]. There’s another new journal on the way too in the shape of eLifeSciences – with it’s own significant differences from current publishing models. Then there was the Finch report on Open Access. If that wasn’t enough fun, there’s been the Alternative metrics “Altmetrics” movement gathering pace [2], alongside suggestions that the impact factor may be losing its grip on the supposed “title” [3].

The impact factors below are the most recent, published June 28th 2012, covering data from 2011. Love them or loathe them, use them or abuse them, game them or shame them … here is a tiny selection of impact factors for the 10,675 journals that are tracked in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) ordered by increasing punch power.

WARNING: Abusing these figures can seriously damage your Science – you have been warned! Normal caveats apply, see nature.com/metrics.

Journal 2011 data from isiknowledge.com/JCR Eigenfactor™ Metrics
Total Cites Impact Factor 5-Year Impact Factor Immediacy Index Articles Cited Half-life Eigenfactor™ Score Article Influence™ Score
Russian Journal of Cardiology* 3 0.005 0.000 75 0.00000
BMC Bioinformatics 14268 2.751 3.493 0.293 557 4.2 0.07757 1.314
PLoS ONE 75544 4.092 4.537 0.437 13781 2.4 0.50216 1.797
Briefings in Bioinformatics 2859 5.202 7.749 0.692 65 4.3 0.01129 2.857
PLoS Computational Biology 8924 5.215 5.844 0.710 407 3.1 0.06968 2.722
OUP Bioinformatics 43380 5.468 6.051 0.666 707 6.2 0.15922 2.606
Nucleic Acids Research 106520 8.026 7.417 2.016 1230 7.4 0.30497 3.003
Genome Biology 15556 9.036 7.896 1.550 151 5.2 0.08221 4.124
PLoS Biology 20579 11.452 13.630 2.461 180 4.6 0.14975 7.830
Science 480836 31.201 32.452 6.075 871 9.4 1.41282 17.508
Nature 526505 36.280 36.235 9.690 841 9.4 1.65658 20.353
New England Journal of Medicine 232068 53.298 50.075 11.484 349 7.8 0.66466 21.293
CA – A Cancer Journal for Clinicians** 10976 101.780 67.410 21.263 19 3.8 0.04502 24.502

* The Russian Journal of Cardiology is included here for reference as it has the lowest non-zero impact factor of any science journal. A rather dubious honour…

** The Cancer Journal for Clinicians is the highest ranked journal in science, it is included here for reference. Could it be the first journal to have an impact factor of more than 100?

References

  1. Richard Van Noorden (2012). Journal offers flat fee for ‘all you can publish’, Nature, 486 (7402) 166. DOI: 10.1038/486166a
  2. Jason Priem, Heather Piwowar and Bradley Hemminger (2012).  Altmetrics in the wild: Using social media to explore scholarly impact arxiv.org/abs/1203.4745
  3. George Lozano, Vincent Lariviere and Yves Gingras (2012). The weakening relationship between the Impact Factor and papers’ citations in the digital age arxiv.org/abs/1205.4328

July 27, 2010

Twenty million papers in PubMed: a triumph or a tragedy?

Filed under: data mining,publishing,web — Duncan Hull @ 3:37 pm
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pubmed.govA quick search on pubmed.gov today reveals that the freely available American database of biomedical literature has just passed the 20 million citations mark*. Should we celebrate or commiserate passing this landmark figure? Is it a triumph or a tragedy that PubMed® is the size it is? (more…)

August 6, 2007

Scifoo day two: Good Morning Mashup

Filed under: informatics — Duncan Hull @ 9:30 pm
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Vince Smith, Brian Berman, Paul Ginsparg, Linda Miller, John SantiniSome of the most interesting conversations you have at Science Foo Camp (scifoo) are in the corridors, foo bars and even the bus that shuttles between the Googleplex and the hotel…On Saturday, for example, I ride the bus with David Hawkins who is a laywer working in the area of climate change. He tells me all about the legal issues, how climate modelling works and little on Bjørn Lomborg, who is also here. I tell him about workflows on the web and bioinformatics. We work in completely different areas, and we’d never normally meet. But in a short conversation, we manage to learn a little from each other and find connections. The problems that climateprediction.net face, turn out to be quite similar to the problems that genomics faces in integrating data on the web. When we arrive at the Googleplex, it’s time for Open Science… (more…)

April 13, 2007

Collaboration, collaboration, collaboration!

Filed under: Uncategorized — Duncan Hull @ 10:05 pm
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Geldof Blair collaborationWhat should your three main priorities be as a Scientist? Collaboration, collaboration, collaboration. Quentin Vicens and Phil Bourne have just published Ten Simple Rules for a Successful Collaboration [1] to help you do just that, as part of a continuing series [2,3,4,5].

Tony Bliar once said “Ask me my three main priorities for government, and I tell you: education, education, education.” In Science, its not so much about education as collaboration, collaboration, collaboration. The advice in Ten Simple Rules is all useful stuff, but what caught my eye is the fact that collaboration is on the rise, at least according to the number of co-authors on papers published in PNAS. The average number of co-authors has risen from 3.9 in 1981 to 8.4 in 2001. So before you publish or perish, it seems likely that you’ll also need to collaborate or commiserate… less laboratory, more collaboratory!

Photo credit Garret Keogh

References

  1. Quentin Vicens and Phillip Bourne (2007) Ten Simple Rules for a Successful Collaboration PLOS Computational Biology
  2. Phillip Bourne (2006) Ten Simple Rules for Getting Published PLOS Computational Biology
  3. Philip Bourne and Iddo Friedberg (2006) Ten Simple Rules for Selecting a Postdoctoral Position PLOS Computational Biology
  4. Phillip Bourne and Leo Chalupa (2006) Ten Simple Rules for Getting Grants PLOS Computational Biology
  5. Phillip Bourne and Alon Korngreen (2006) Ten Simple Rules for Reviewers PLOS Computational Biology
  6. This post originally published on nodalpoint with comments

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December 1, 2006

NAR Web Server Issue: Walking in a Webby Wonderland

Filed under: Uncategorized — Duncan Hull @ 3:18 pm
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WonderlandHave you recently built a bioinformatics web application useful to the wider community that you’d like to tell the world about? Are you also looking to score brownie points for a rigourously peer-reviewed publication that stands a reasonable chance of being well cited? If that’s you, then you have one month from today (December 1st) to sort your code out, and get your abstract in, for the fifth annual Nucleic Acids Research (NAR) Web Server issue published by Oxford University Press (OUP) in 2007. All articles in this issue are published under an open access model.

As regular visitors to nodalpoint will already know, every year NAR publishes two special issues: one on databases (annually in January since 1993) and the other on web servers (annually in July since 2003). Authors interested in pre-submitting abstracts for the 2007 Web Server Issue should read the Instructions to Authors for Web Server papers in NAR and send an abstract to Gary Benson at Boston University before December 31st 2006. The deadline for final submission of full articles is January 31st 2007. Gary Benson has taken over this year from previous web server issue editor, Nobel laureate and Ignobel participant, Richard Roberts [1].

One advantage of publishing your application paper in NAR, instead of alternative open access journals like Source Code for Biology and Medicine (SCFBM), is a listing in the bioinformatics links directory [2] and a bigger impact factor [3] of 7.6, if you care about these things. There are of course, disadvantages of publishing with OUP in NAR, like the expensive open access publishing fees of $1185 to $2370 per article which are debateable value-for-money. If you’re living in a ‘List A’ developing country these charges are waived, which makes it tempting to set up a laboratory in Malawi to evade payment…

Anyway, does anyone out there know how OUP prices compare with the complicated Biomed Central membership fees which are presumably required for publication in SCFBM? Another leading open access publisher, the Public Library of Science (PLOS) currently charges from $2000 to $2500 for open access publication. Maybe I’m missing something, but aren’t these charges a lot of money to pay an administrator to shuffle a few bits of paper around and run a web server? Don’t let that put you off submitting your paper though, because in Science and academia you will either publish or perish. This is where the web is your friend because free online web availability substantially increases a paper’s impact.

On a lighter note, and now that the festive season is upon us, I’ll hand over to the Christmas crooner Perry Como to sign off:

♫ Sleigh bells ring, are you listening? In the lane, snow is glistening. A beautiful sight, We’re happy tonight, Walking in a webby wonderland. ♫


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