Hello, To the point raised by Alan. I think that it is very important to rank journals on other standards. However, for a young scientist seeking a position, his/her papers may be very good but have no had time to be cited yet. How do you rate their success? I think that impact factor may be one of the only ways. Another way may be the rejection rate of the papers, which may be a better metric to assess quality than IF (see this paper: Aarssen et. al. The Open Ecology Journal 1:14-19).
I myself published two papers in PLoS ONE, one of them led by my grad student. I am now running for tenure and my grad student will look soon for a post-doctoral position. For these purposes, I am sorry to admit -as I am up for other standards- publishing in PLoS ONE has not been beneficial for either of us, specially in Spain, where IF is the standard. Thus, young scientists who care about the immediate impact of their publications, should not rely on the standards of PLoS ONE unless they wait for the citations to come up. Best, Jordi Moya ________________________________________ De: Ecological Society of America: grants, jobs, news [[email protected]] En nombre de Alan Wilson [[email protected]] Enviado el: jueves, 29 de octubre de 2009 14:02 Para: [email protected] Asunto: Re: [ECOLOG-L] Journal impact factor hilit et al., some journal's choose not to be ISI-listed (e.g., PLoS ONE) for various reasons. i, and others, have shown limitations with journal impact factors (see partial list of recent papers below). although no one metric works for all situations (e.g., how do we evaluate applied journals where results from their papers are used by natural resource managers but not cited in the peer-reviewed literature?), i am a fan of www.Eigenfactor.org (no info about Urban Ecosystems is available). this site provides metrics for journal quality and value (these data are now available as part of ISI's journal citation reports). the algorithms function similar to how Google ranks websites and include variation in citation rates across disciplines. i think that scientists, administrators, tenure and promotion committees, students, editors, journals, etc. should focus less on journal impact factors and more on the production of quality, interesting, and useful science. alan SOME RECENT PAPERS ABOUT JOURNAL IMPACT FACTORS Agrawal, A. A. 2005. Corruption of journal Impact Factors. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 20:157-157. Althouse, B. M., J. D. West, C. T. Bergstrom, and T. Bergstrom. 2009. Differences in Impact Factor Across Fields and Over Time. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 60:27-34. Brumback, R. A. 2008. Worshiping false idols: The impact factor dilemma. Journal of Child Neurology 23:365-367. Campanario, J. M. and L. Gonzalez. 2006. Journal self-citations that contribute to the impact factor: Documents labeled "editorial material" in journals covered by the Science Citation Index. Scientometrics 69:365-386. Colquhoun, D. 2003. Challenging the tyranny of impact factors. Nature 423:479-479. Golubic, R., M. Rudes, N. Kovacic, M. Marusic, and A. Marusic. 2008. Calculating impact factor: How bibliographical classification of journal items affects the impact factor of large and small journals. Science and Engineering Ethics 14:41-49. Greenwood, D. C. 2007. Reliability of journal impact factor rankings. Bmc Medical Research Methodology 7. Hecht, F., B. K. Hecht, and A. A. Sandberg. 1998. The journal "impact factor": A misnamed, misleading, misused measure. Cancer Genetics and Cytogenetics 104:77-81. Lawrence, P. A. 2007. The mismeasurement of science. Current Biology 17:R583-R585. Moed, H. F. and T. N. vanLeeuwen. 1996. Impact factors can mislead. Nature 381:186-186. Seglen, P. O. 1997. Why the impact factor of journals should not be used for evaluating research. British Medical Journal 314:498-502. Wilcox, A. J. 2008. Rise and fall of the Thomson impact factor. Epidemiology 19:373-374. Wilson, A. E. 2007. Journal impact factors are inflated. Bioscience 57:550-551. link: http://wilsonlab.com/publications/2007_BioScience_Wilson.pdf At 07:27 AM 10/28/2009, you wrote: >Hello dear list users, >Does anyone know the journal Urban ecosystems? >It still doesn't have an impact factor and i wanted to know if any of you >knows why. > >Thanks, > >-- >Hilit Finkler >PhD student >Zoology department >The George S. Wise Life sciences faculty >Tel Aviv University >Israel --- Alan Wilson - Assistant Professor Auburn University - Fisheries and Allied Aquacultures www.wilsonlab.com - [email protected]
