Whenever people start discussing impact factors, I like to call to
their attention this paper from Current Biology that was written by
Peter Lawrence of Cambridge.
PA Lawrence, the mismeasurement of science
http://making-of-a-fly.me/files/pdf/mism_science.pdf
I have included an excerpt here:
"Answe
Cool paper!
Yes, I agree with you, but that is what the majority of the world uses
so we are kind of stuck.
Here is a paper I did that compared herpetologists directly:
http://www.herpetologynotes.seh-herpetology.org/Volume3_PDFs/McCallum_Herpetology_Notes_Volume3_pages239-245.pdf
Here is a ve
Calculating an impact factor from a larger database satisfies one of the
smallest problems with the impact factor. I think it's already been done for
the Scopus database for some journals. It is still a bit absurd to draw too
much inference based solely from the mean of a highly non-normal
distribu
I am posting this to inform all journal editors/producers that a new
alternate organization is producing an impact factor. My
understanding is that they are using the same formula as
Thomson-Reuters but they are including a much much wider set of
journals. Essentially, they are trying to use all
