Thursday, January 21, 2010

Do no count citations, impact numbers

This from D. N. Arnold, SIAM NEWS, December 4, 2009 (via my friend Gregor)
Integrity Under Attack: The State of Scholarly Publishing

Pay no heed to silly numbers - just check what journal the good publications that you have read are, publish there. Even that can be gamed and is, in good journals like Physical Review Letters; once you establish a little subfield, with a group of friends citing and refereeing each other, it can have a good run with not very good articles. There is no defense other than common sense.

3 comments:

Mason said...

Right, the whole El Natszhe business. (I spelled his name wrong, but he's not worth the time for me to look it up.)

I had been wondering for years why that journal had such a high impact factor---as opposed to the, you know, large number of much better journals in the same field---so although the whole thing is a farce, it does seem to be true that the wheels of justice turn even though they turn excruciatingly slowly...

ChaosBook said...

SIAM aims to combat plagiarism with CrossCheck:
CrossCheck is an initiative started by CrossRef to help its members actively engage in efforts to prevent scholarly and professional plagiarism. SIAM now uses CrossCheck to compare each journal submission to a huge database of published scholarly articles in order to combat plagiarism. In addition to actively taking a stand, SIAM
feels this proactive step will save time spent by editors and referees reviewing manuscripts that would later be found to be copied from another source.

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