Comments on: The Impact Factor: A Tool from a Bygone Era?

By: PLoS Journals – measuring impact where it matters | The Official PLoS Blog

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:43:18 +0000

[...] As summarized by Michael Jensen, and discussed by many others including recently over at the Scholarly Kitchen, there’s a lot more to scientific impact than citations in the selection of journals covered by [...]

By: Jason Priem

Jason Priem — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 17:50:45 +0000

Kent, this is a terrific and prescient post; you are spot-on about the value of these alternative metrics. I recently cited this post in “Scientometrics 2.0: Toward new metrics of scholarly impact on the social Web,” published last week in First Monday.

By: Scientometrics 2.0 – Jason Priem

Scientometrics 2.0 – Jason Priem — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 02:22:13 +0000

[...] informed my general thinking–but not enough to cite? Just looking at citations, we’re missing many other kinds of impact. Ten years ago, this was the best we could do. But today, scholars are using online tools like [...]

By: Five for Friday: Biggest Breakthroughs in Open Science « Hypios – Thinking

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:39:26 +0000

[...] their homework on YouTube, links to scientific articles from sites like Wikipedia represent usage that’s just as valid as a PhD student’s downloading of an [...]

By: Peter Binfield

Peter Binfield — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:32:22 +0000

Torsten – you are thinking about the journal in a somewhat traditional manner though I think.

Why should the quality of an article be a binary thing? (i.e. “it is in Nature, therefore it is good. vs. It is not in Nature, therefore it is bad”). An alternative could be to publish everything that passes peer review but then have the peer reviewers and or editors assign a ‘grade’ to each paper. In this way, the grade could be used as a “day one” indicator of possible value of the article, as you requested (and it would have been measured by the same system which is currently used to make accept/reject decisions on a selective journal) and this group of “highly graded” papers could then become a high quality brand of their own.

By: Kent Anderson

Kent Anderson — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 14:54:12 +0000

Blog coverage and downloads occur much more quickly than citations. The issue you’re getting at is brand power. We assume that the most important papers find their way into the most important journals. There is a strong correlation, but cause-effect is a bit harder to ferret out. Also, the utility of a paper may be hidden by this. Many clinical/practitioner/bench journals publish useful studies that aren’t cited because they’re used instead. With the current impact factor system, citations take months or years to accumulate. We live in a faster, more fluid information environment than the one Eugene Garfield predicated his system upon.

By: Torsten

Torsten — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 10:14:39 +0000

If one needs all this data like blog coverage and downloads to see the value of an article does that not mean that I need to wait some month after the article came out to see if it is a good one? If a paper appears in Nature etc. I would assume it is worth reading right away. The same problem appears if I’m a young scientist applying for my first grant and all of my papers have just been published recently. How could I convince people that the research I did has a gread impact if this will only be seen some month/years later?

By: PLoS Journals – measuring impact where it matters « Speaking of Medicine

PLoS Journals – measuring impact where it matters « Speaking of Medicine — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:20:02 +0000

By: PLoS Journals – measuring impact where it matters « everyONE – the PLoS ONE community blog

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 19:26:39 +0000

By: memotypic

memotypic — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 12:38:49 +0000

This is interesting for that: http://thedata.org/ and there are lots of discussions and other things appearing, but it has to be more or less universal (DOIs as a component would help, maybe with OpenIDs, in some kind of registry).