Skeletons In Their Closet: Clarivate Issues Editorial Concern But Takes No Further Action
A public allegation of citation manipulation among 5 journals deserves a public inquiry.
Journal Growth Lowers Impact Factor
Phil Davis examines how publication timing can affect annual Journal Impact Factor scores.
Guest Post: Do Journal Article Recommendation Features Change Reader Behavior?
Researchers say journal article recommendations are useful. Do these publisher platform features influence user behavior? How might they increase discovery and serendipity in the researcher’s workflow? A series of studies provide new evidence of increased reader engagement.
How Much Citation Manipulation Is Acceptable?
Is citation manipulation a moral problem or an accounting problem?
Citation Performance Indicators — A Very Short Introduction
A brief summary of the main citation indicators used today.
Supply, Demand, and the Subscription Model in Scholarly Publishing — An Analysis
An overview of usage trends across libraries and journals indicates that usage is generally stable or up, archives remain of interest, and consumption doesn’t align with authorship or funding.
CiteScore–Flawed But Still A Game Changer
The real innovation of CiteScore is not another performance metric, but a new marketing model focused on editors.
Peering across the Copyright DMZ
A new book reviews various instances of piracy in the media industry and proposes using Big Data analyses as a means to manage it.
Is Publication Success a Matter of Dumb Luck?
Researchers may publish their best work at any point in their careers, a new study reports. This is not the same as success being the result of random forces or just plain “dumb luck.”
Visualizing Citation Cartels
Citation network maps may indicate when gaming is taking place. Proving intention is a different story.
How to Manipulate a Citation Histogram
Citation indexes need to provide standardized citation histograms for editors and publishers. Without them, it is unlikely that they will be widely adopted. At worse, it will encourage the production of histograms that selectively highlight or obscure the data.
Optical Illusions — Shifting to Citation Distributions Only Makes It Easier to Fool the Eye
A proposal to substitute graphs of citation distributions for impact factors introduces many problems the authors don’t seem to have fully grasped, including unintentionally bolstering the importance of the very metric they seek to diminish.
Citation Networks Yield Competitive Intelligence
Citation networks can provide much more than journal metrics and rankings. Publishers should look to them for competitive intelligence.
On Moose and Medians (Or Why We Are Stuck With The Impact Factor)
If Thomson Reuters can calculate Impact Factors and Eigenfactors, why can’t they deliver a simple median score?
Citable Items: The Contested Impact Factor Denominator
Thomson Reuters’ approach of indexing by journal section and revising by demand leads to great inconsistencies across journals and inflates the Impact Factors of elite journals. The solution: remove the human element.