Comments on: Impact Factor Inflation — What Causes It? http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2008/05/07/impact-factor-inflation-what-causes-it/ What's Hot & What's Cooking in Scholarly Publishing - from the Society for Scholarly Publishing Wed, 15 Feb 2012 17:25:09 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Citations & the Missing Link « The Scholarly Kitchen http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2008/05/07/impact-factor-inflation-what-causes-it/#comment-626 Tue, 29 Jul 2008 17:34:09 +0000 http://scholarlykitchen.wordpress.com/?p=83#comment-626 [...] noted in a prior post on this blog, impact factor inflation has been found to be primarily caused by longer r…. But are these lists increasingly just academic posturing? Citations occur for many reasons. How [...]

]]> By: Phil Davis http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2008/05/07/impact-factor-inflation-what-causes-it/#comment-226 Wed, 07 May 2008 16:52:37 +0000 http://scholarlykitchen.wordpress.com/?p=83#comment-226 I see this increase more as a result of lowering barriers to access information. Not having to walk across campus to retrieve a marginal article from a library’s print stacks…not having to fill out an interlibrary loan form and wait for days…and not having to pay to photocopy articles all increase the likelihood that I’ll cite an article (especially if it is a marginal article).

Conversely, the easier it is for me to retrieve articles from my library’s online subscriptions (to new and archived articles), the easier it is for me to contact authors directly for a copy of what my library doesn’t have, and the easier it is for me to read and incorporate their articles in my own work, the more likely I’ll cite.

In sum, the inflation is an indication that information is getting easier to access for authors. This is without a doubt, good news!

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