Choosing a journal V: impact factor

This the fifth post in my series on choosing a journal, following posts on getting your paper published quickly, getting it noticed, practicalities, and peer review procedure.

It is all very well getting your paper seen by lots of people, but will that lead to an increase in your reputation? Will it lead to that all-important grant, promotion or university rating?

The impact factor of a journal is a measure of the average number of citations of papers published over the previous two years in the year being measured. A very common view among academics is that having your paper published in a journal with a high impact factor is the most important thing they can do to ensure tenure, funding, promotion and generally success. And in fact the impact factor of the journals your papers are in still has a big influence on many of those whose job it is to assess scientists (as discussed recently on Michael Eisen’s blog). It is also a factor in whether librarians choose to subscribe to a journal, which will affect how widely your paper is seen.

So even if the impact factor has flaws, it is still important. However, remember the following caveats:

• Citations are only a proxy measure of the actual impact of a paper – your paper could have an enormous influence while not being cited in academic journals
• Impact doesn’t only occur in the two years following the publication of the paper: in slow moving fields, in which seminal papers are cited five or ten years after publication, these late citations won’t get counted towards the impact factor so the journal’s impact factor will be smaller than justified
• The impact factor measures the average impact of papers in the journal; some will be cited much more, some not at all
• There are ways for journals to ‘game‘ impact factors, such as manipulating types of article so that the less cited ones won’t be counted in the calculation
• The methods used for calculating the impact factor are proprietary and not published
• Averages can be skewed by a single paper that is very highly cited (e.g. the 2009 impact factor of Acta Crystallographica A)
• Although impact factors are calculated to three decimal places, I haven’t seen any analysis of the error in their estimation, so a difference in half a point may be completely insignificant
• New journals don’t get an impact factor until they have been publishing for at least three years.

So although it is worth looking at the impact factor of a journal to which you are considering submitting your paper, don’t take it too seriously. Especially don’t take small differences between the impact factors of different journals as meaningful.

Other new metrics are being developed to measure average impact of journals, such as the Eigenfactor and Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) and SCImago Journal Rank (SJR). These might be worth looking at in combination with the impact factor when choosing a journal.

Your experience

How important is the impact factor of a journal in your decision to submit there? Have you taken other measures of impact into account? Do you think the impact factor of journals you have published in has affected the post-publication life of your papers?

And journal editors, how much difference does the impact factor of your journal make to how many papers are submitted to it, or to your marketing? Do you know the Eigenfactor, SNIP or SJR of your journal?

Journal news for 20-27 January

A brief summary of recent news related to journals and scientific publishing.

Datasets International

The open access publisher Hindawi has launced Datasets International, which “aims at helping researchers in all academic disciplines archive, document, and distribute the datasets produced in their research to the entire academic community.” For a processing charge of $300 authors can upload an apparently unlimited amount of data under a Creative Commons CC0 licence (and associated dataset papers under an Attribution licence), according to comments on Scott Edmunds’ Gigablog. The new journals currently associated with this initiative are Dataset Papers in: Cell Biology, Optics, Atmospheric Sciences and Materials Science, though no doubt more will follow. (Heard via @ScottEdmunds.)

Peerage of Science

A company run by three Finnish scientists this week has a new take on improving peer review. Peerage of Science is a community of scientists (‘Peers’), formed initially by invitation, who review each other’s papers anonymously before submission to journals. Reviews are themselves subjected to review, which means that reviewers receive recognition and ratings for their work. The reviews can even be published in a special journal, Proceedings of the Peerage of Science. Journals can offer to publish manuscripts at any point, for a fee – this is how the company aims to make a profit. (Heard via chemistryworldblog, via @adametkin.)

Peer review by curated social media

Science writer Carl Zimmer (@carlzimmer) reported last week in the New York Times on a recent (open access) study in Proc Natl Acad Sci USA about the generation of multicellular yeast by artificial selection in the lab. He has now posted a follow-up article in his Discovery blog, in which he presents the conversation that followed on Twitter about this paper (using Storify) and invites the author to respond, which the author does. The comments on the latter post continue the conversation, and the author continues to respond. It’s an interesting example of the author of a controversial paper engaging constructively in post-publication peer review. (Heard via @DavidDobbs.)

Research Objects

Tom Scott (@derivadow, who works for Nature Publishing Group) has published a detailed blog post outlining a proposal for a new kind of scientific publication: the Research Object. This would be a collection of material, linked by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), including an article, raw data, protocols, links to news about the research published elsewhere, links to the authors and their institutions, and more. He credits the Force11 (‘Future of Research Communications and e-Scholarship’) community for the idea, which is developed in greater detail here (pdf). These elements may or may not be open access, although the sophisticated searches Scott envisages will be difficult if they are not. (Heard via @SpringerPlus.)

Analysis of F1000 Journal Rankings

Phil Davis of The Scholarly Kitchen has done an analysis of the journal ranking system announced by Faculty of 1000 (F1000) in October. The analysis includes nearly 800 journals that were given a provisional F1000 Journal Factor (called FFj by F1000) for 2010. Plotting the FFj of each journal against the number of articles from it that were evaluated by F1000 shows that the two numbers are closely related; in fact, the number of articles evaluated explains over 91% of the variation in FFj. Journals from which only a few articles were evaluated suffer not only from this bias, but also from a bias against interdisciplinary and physical science journals that publish little biology. It seems to me that these biases could easily be addressed by taking into account (a) the number of articles evaluated from each journal and (b) the proportion of biology articles published in it when calculating the FFj. F1000 would be wise to study this useful analysis when reviewing their ranking system, as they plan to do regularly, according to the original announcement. (Heard via @ScholarlyKitchn.)

Journal News

A brief summary of recent news related to journals and scientific publishing.

Journal of Errology

A new venture came to my notice this week that aims to provide “an experimental online research repository that enables sharing and discussions on those unpublished futile hypothesis, errors, iterations, negative results, false starts and other original stumbles that are part of a larger successful research in biological sciences.” It is not clear whether the Journal of Errology will succeed, but it is an interesting development that might fill a gap that journals are currently neglecting.

Figshare

Another place to send your miscellaneous data is figshare, which relaunched this week. This “allows researchers to publish all of their research outputs in seconds in an easily citable, sharable and discoverable manner”. They are encouraging researchers to upload negative data, supplementary material that is too large for journal limits, and miscellaneous figures that aren’t likely to get written up as a paper.

The Research Works Act

You’ll probably have heard about the Research Works Act (RWA) being proposed in the US, which would prohibit the NIH or other federal bodies from mandating (as the NIH currently does) that taxpayer-funded research should be freely accessible online.  A summary for UK readers by Mike Taylor (@SauropodMike) is here. The act is supported by the American Publishers Association, and Twitter has been full of scientists lobbying journal publishers to come out against it. So far, the AAAS (publisher of Science) and Nature Publishing Group have been among the journal publishers opposing the RWA.

An open peer review experiment

AJ Cann (@AJCann) is inviting comments on a research paper (entitled “An efficient and effective system for interactive student feedback using Google+ to enhance an institutional virtual learning environment”) on his blog, as a form of open peer review. He’s received several reviews so far, as well as comments on the process.

A journal using WordPress

Andrés Guadamuz, the technical editor of SCRIPTed, the open access journal of Law and Technology, has written a blog post “Confessions of an open access editor” that mentions that the journal is now one of the few hosted by WordPress. Given the recent launch of Annotum, the WordPress add-on for authoring scholarly publications, it looks like WordPress is going to become more important as a platform in the future.

A survey on attitudes to open access

The International Journal of Clinical Practice (IJCP), published by Wiley, has launched a survey on what authors think about the idea of the journal going completely open access (rather than having it as an option as at present). They will be asking all submitting authors for the next six months and are also inviting others to write a Letter to the Editor with their thoughts. They seem to be genuinely interested in authors’ views and not pushing either for or against open access.

The ‘academic dollar’ altmetric

A post by Sabine Hossenfelder on the BackReaction blog (which I heard about via @ScholarlyKitchn) discusses a 2010 paper entitled “An Auction Market for Journal Articles” that suggests an ‘academic dollar’ “that would be traded among editors, authors, and reviewers and create incentives for each involved party to improve the quality of articles”. They are scathing about this proposal, describing it as an example of “Verschlimmbesserung”, defined by Urban Dictionary as “an attempted improvement that makes things worse than they already were”. Altmetrics may be on the rise, but it looks like this one won’t be taking off.

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2012/01/academic-dollar.html