Hi Stanislaw,

clearly, any kind of such measures which condense a whole career, the linked creativity and the impact (in a multifold way: impact on the specific research field, of the whole tradition of a field or research in general, or even more, impact on societal and culture aspects) to one single index MUST be weak, biased and inadequate if applied to single individuals. So the ame holds true for single assessments of articles or journals: ON AVERAGE, a journal has an impact factor, and of course this is reflected as a distribution of empirical impact of single articles. So, I would always try to reach conclusions on a variety of measures and personal assessments. And of course the development goes further. There are new ways of measureing impact related to the specific research field, adjusted to multi-authorship, or taking the research age (I define this the span of years from the first WebOfScience publication to the present year--the research age is of course very important to take into account to integrate the mere possibility of having had great impact yet).

So never trust any such measure as such and do not "autistically" take them for granted without taking other factors into account, I would always recommend.

Best wishes,

CCC

Well said! I agree with you take. It almost sounds like we could, given the emerging new paradigm of "research vital signs", make an argument for just that! Would you be interested in participating in a "call to arms" for re-evaluation of the way we "value" someone's contributions?

Cheers,

Stan.

Dear Stan,

certainly, you can count on me.

Best wishes,

CCC

Ok will send you a private message via RG when the outline is done. I am putting together a team as we speak.

Thanks!

I would suggest the 'dinosaur' is still relevant and if anything its teeth are getting sharper.  I remember a time when simply the number of publications was the metric - now we consider IF and I would suggest that with the proliferation of online publication formats, some dubious to say the least, the IF is going to become more important than ever.

Paul, what then is your take on the fact that "free of charge", open access journals are going to be preferentially used when you click on the "full article" link and get the ever-beautiful message "pay $30 for one-time view of this paper". Isn't that alone going to lead to a shift away from high IF toward lower IF, but in the end, towards "one IF" -- kind of a "perfect market" scenario from economics???

From what I have seen, there is increasing evidence that this is exactly why impact factor is becoming less important and citation indices are becoming more important. Someone's ability to get into a journal with IF >5 may be so prohibitive that unless they go for the "low hanging fruit", they will never get published (and I mean "never"). Yet, their thoughts may be so ahead of their time that others will continue to fail to "get the message" until the time is right...

Worse yet -- and I hope this is not happening, but something tells me that it may be -- when such original thinkers submit to high IF journals, their failed submissions may provide perfect "idea generator" for the unnamed others...