I find many scientists obsess with JIF and number of publications as this may bring them promotions, jobs, and grants. But, JIF clearly isn't a great way to assess the quality of one's work. Why can't we adopt the average percentile of a publication instead?
Could you be a little bit more specific? Do you mean average of percentile positions in citation ranking of each paper published by a given journal over a given analytical period (year)?
In describe impact factor is measure yearly average number of citations imported in recent article published in particular journal. Journal with high impact factor generally believe to be significant for the authenticity of research. It is accepted view that there are number of critics “the impact factor might not be consistently reproduced in an independent audit and there is also a more general debate on the validity of the impact factor as a measure of journal importance and the effect of policies that editors may adopt to boost their impact factor” to determine readers and authors Others have criticized the impact factor more generally on the institutional background of the neoliberal academia, claiming that what is needed is not just its replacement with more sophisticated metrics but a democratic discussion on the social value of research assessment and the growing precariousness of scientific careers” (Wikipedia,2017). Impact factor is affected by field dependent factor which basically invalid comparison. The percentage of citation occurring in first 2 years after publication may vary.
Dear Anna, I got this from thomson reuters website: http://ipscience-help.thomsonreuters.com/inCites2Live/indicatorsGroup/aboutHandbook/usingCitationIndicatorsWisely/averagePercentile.html
The percentile of a publication is determined by creating a citation frequency distribution for all the publications in the same year, subject category and of the same document type (arranging the papers in descending order of citation count), and determining the percentage of papers at each level of citation, i.e., the percentage of papers cited more often than the paper of interest. If a paper has a percentile value of one, then 99 percent of the papers in the same subject category, year and of the same document type have a citation count that is lower.
Cheers!
Dear Chin,
I am already familiar with definition of the percentile. But my question was (following link you provided - "(...) for any set of papers, an Average Percentile can be calculated") what "set of papers" do you propose? Papers published by given journal or maybe papers written by given author?
If we calculate indicators directly for authors then maybe not average but sum should be considered.
There are many other proposals of indicators for evaluating science, and debates on their effectiveness continue to this day and do not seem to end quickly.
E.g. look at:
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_research_evaluation_a_vicious_or_angelic_circle
Dear Anna,
Thank you very much for your answer. Both also sound promising. It seems easier to use the values given from a journal. But, I think not every journal provide such values at the moment? Cheers!
Dear Chin,
That is the point. Moreover not every journal is indexed by Web of Science. But there are many other bibliographic databases - e.g. CrossRef. An interesting approach presents the OpenCitations, which provides data as an "RDF network", where anyone can calculate (e.g. using SPARQL language) indicators that would like.
See:
http://opencitations.net/sparql
https://essepuntato.github.io/presentations/oc-force2017.html
https://www.researchgate.net/project/PLOS-ONE-a-case-study-of-citation-analysis-of-research-papers-based-on-the-data-in-an-open-citation-index-The-OpenCitations-Corpus
The responses of a question about how these factors were used in research proposal evaluation and classification of academics indicate increasing importance.
https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_much_is_the_Science_Citation_Index_SCI_database_used_in_national_evaluation_of_research_proposals
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