PhysMath Central Blog
Mathematicians criticize impact factors
The Wall Street Journal's blog reports on the increasing dissatisfaction of mathematicians with impact factors. Nothing really new in the blog posting (for those who follow bibliometrics), but interesting to see that the arguments are getting much wider exposure now.
The posting was inspired by the release of the report by the International Mathematical Union (IMU) in cooperation with the International Council of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) on Citation Statistics. Brief excerpt:
For journals, the impact factor is most often used for ranking. This is a simple average derived from the distribution of citations for a collection of articles in the journal. The average captures only a small amount of information about that distribution, and it is a rather crude statistic. In addition, there are many confounding factors when judging journals by citations, and any comparison of journals requires caution when using impact factors. Using the impact factor alone to judge a journal is like using weight alone to judge a person's health.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 15:12 Comments (0)
