ismn
2008 Chemistry
Journals Impact Factors|
qualitas1998.net
ismn
2008 Chemistry
Journals Impact Factors |
| Search |
|
Large changes in the
impact factors of chemistry journals published on June
2009 by
Thomson ISI Journal Citation
Reports (JRC).
A journal impact factor is calculated dividing the number of citations in a year by the number of citeable articles published in the preceding two years. You may be interested in my posts commenting peer-reviewing for free and the recent PR affaire involving major scientific publishers |
Wiley-VCH
RSC Publishing
ACS |
Elsevier journals in general are on the rise, especially in the fields of organic, inorganic and materials chemistry.
Organic chemistry
Chemical engineering, inorganic, analytical and materials chemistry
Is the impact factor is a reliable measurement of scientific quality? This post of Derek Love offers insight.
«"Impact factors" are an attempt to quantify what everyone knows empirically: some journals are more prestigious than others.
The whole business comes from the folks at ISI (now owned by Thomson.) They had been publishing the Citation Index for years, which was (and is) a way to find out who had referenced a given paper in the scientific literature after it was published. This can be useful if you want to see if anyone's followed up or commented on an interesting paper (or if you just want to see if anyone's cited your own work.)
About ten years ago, they introduced the Impact Factor to do the same thing for scientific journals...
The publishing community - initially rather worried and skeptical, if my memory serves - has gone completely crazy over the whole idea. Now journals advertise themselves by their impact factors. "Publish here! We're a good journal, really! We have proof!" If you'd like to know what a particular journal's rating is, they'll probably shout it out if it's any good at all. A failure to mention the number, down to three decimal places, is an act that speaks for itself.
Everyone whose livelihood depends on scientific publication, though, already knows them well, since anything that can be measured will be used at performance evaluation time. IFs are a particular obsession in academic research, since publishing papers is one of those things that an aspiring tenure-seeking associate professor is expected to do. (On the priority list, it comes right after hauling down the grant money)...
The less interesting papers are getting a free impact ride, while the better ones could have presumably been playing off in a super-impact league of their own, if such a journal existed. The authors also point out that journals covering new fields with a rapidly expanding literature - much of which is also ephemeral - have necessarily inflated IFs. Does it really indicate their quality? (Well now, say the pro-impact people, isn't this just the sort of carping you'd expect from the BMJ, who live in the shadow of the more-prestigious Lancet?)
On a different level, there's plenty of room to hate the whole idea, regardless of how it's implemented. The number of citations, say such critics, is not necessarily the only (or best) measure of a paper's worth, or the worth of the journal it appears in. (As that link shows, the original papers from both Salk and Sabin on their polio vaccines are on no one's list of high citation rates.)»
Back to the home page of Mario Pagliaro's Lab