On Mon, 13 Sep 1999, sterling stoudenmire wrote: > What bothers me about this email is that it suggests that if enough good > journals.. it is my contention that there are many, many good journals; the > problem is, they have, until the ebiomed been dwarfed by the thinking of > good vs bad journals.. please define a bad journal. thanks.
"Good" journals are the ones that report work that is worth doing, reading and, most important, building upon. This is (imperfectly) correlated with things like the journal's citation impact factor, rejection rate, and the research calibre (somewhat circular) of its authors, editors and referees, hence its articles. There are over 14,000 refereed journals indexed by Ulrich's, 6,500 of them indexed by Science Citation Index. Most published articles are uncited (except perhaps by their own authors), and many probably unread. Just about everything that gets submitted, gets published somewhere in the hierarchy, from the most rigorously refereed journals at the top to the vanity press at the bottom. If you don't like the shorthand of "strong/weak" (I didn't use "good/bad"), pick some other term correlated (imperfectly) with this hierarchy of quality and quality-control-rigour. My point was that the for-fee vs. for-free dichotomy should NOT be correlated with that dimension. My worry was that PubMed Central might inadvertently make it so; my hope is that it will not -- and all of our efforts will be in the latter direction. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad har...@cogsci.soton.ac.uk Professor of Cognitive Science har...@princeton.edu Department of Electronics and phone: +44 2380 592-582 Computer Science fax: +44 2380 592-865 University of Southampton http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/
