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PLoS Says NO to Journal Impact Factor

July 30th, 2009 · 14 Comments · uncategorized

The simple and direct measurement of scientific publications is assessed traditionally by the journal impact factor in terms of the citation analysis of the average performance of the papers published in the journal. The journal impact factor, with the latest 2008 IF list released last month, is relatively an appropriate impact indicator of the scholarly journal and help readers to select the literatures in their own research fields.

However, the journal impact factor goes too far. The journal impact factors are distracting ourselves from the individual article itself, and we are dropped into the journal impact factor GAME and manipulation.

So, how to measure the impact of an article or journal?

Mark Patterson, Director of Publishing of the “open access” Public Library of Science (PLoS), writes a post on the PLoS blog titiled “PLoS Journals – measuring impact where it matters“, in which he discusses that assessing individual articles should not be confined to single indicator “impact factor” based on the citations of the arcticles the journal covering.

“there’s a lot more to scientific impact than citations in the selection of journals covered by the Web of Science – the proprietary source of data that provides the impact factor calculation. Citations can be counted more broadly, along with web usage, blog and media coverage, social bookmarks, expert/community comments and ratings, and so on”, “standards will need to be developed so that the indicators are reliable”.

Unlike other publishing group with a promoting by the journal impact factor on homepage of corresponding journal’s website, PLoS journals say NO, “It’s time to move on, and focus efforts on more sophisticated, flexible and meaningful measures”, Patterson writes.

PS: As a developmental biology student, I like reading the PLoS ONE and PLoS Biology journal, the papers are pretty cool!

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