This is the description of the round table at the upcoming ECPR general conference in Bordeaux, between 9:00 and 10:40 on Thursday 5 September, room P9:
"Academic journals are an important infrastructure for a scholarly discipline like political science. Professional editing and reviewing are instrumental to achieve high-quality products. Moreover, it has become common to scientometrists, research managers and policy makers to use journal output and article citation for their analysis and decision-making. One early, and particularly prominent variable in this game has been the "impact factor" (IF). With the "San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment", the scientific community recently attempted to critically counter the tendency to misuse the IF, as well as other metrics. In this round table, the usage of the IF among leading political science journals will be discussed, as well as its usage for decision-making processes in the social sciences. Are there alternative models to assess scientific quality in the social sciences?"
http://am.ascb.org/dora/
Impact Factor of journals is a scale of rating journals. Although is rating tools is not free from short comings yet it is the most important available instrument with the scientific world. Social Sciences being local in applicability their citation is not universal. Moreover the working Social Scientists in the world are less in number that is why the publications and then citations are less. Thirdly citation analysis is highly manipulated business as most of the writers are making a cartel and citing each others' work in some selected journals in order to maintain journals' impact factor and their personal citation analysis.
Well, I don't think too positively about Impact Factor, Peer-Review and those instruments that sound good but don't work. Recently I found (can't remember how) a more or less systematic critique on the journal jungle of the moment: altmetrics. Maybe that is useful for you: http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/
Hi Thomas, Bordeaux sounds like a fantatsic location for any discussion. I do think that discussions of IF tend to generate more heat than light, however. This is because the arguments are well known and well rehearsed. The San Francisco Declaration website and Reed Elsevier's position statement and response to the San Francisco Declaration published on their website summarise they key positions. My thought was that as the ECPR haven't signed up to the San Francisco Declaration perhaps it might be more lively to put forward the proposition that they should!
My other thought is to discuss why academics cannot entertain more than one measure of quality. There seems to be a fixation with having numbers and only one at that. Why can't they entertain a plurality of metrics? Perhaps even some qualitative measure, take a more holistic view? Best Wishes, Matt
also an interesting contribution on the IF: http://www.academia.edu/4294133/Impact_Factor_Fetishism
An interesting dissertation about the use of citations when evaluating research quality is
.... "Bibliometrics ( is) for dummies" by M. Cosentino in www.roars.it (Italian language)
See also my prepared statement for the round table:
http://www.academia.edu/4389392/Input_for_Round_Table_From_impact_to_relevance_
Three important points regarding bibliometric indicators.
http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/bibliometrics_statement.html
By the way, how was the round table? Did you reach any conclusions or recommendations? A publication, perhaps?
Note also my paper on the predictive value (for citation number) of rank-normalized journal impact factor:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/24012689_Rank-normalized_journal_impact_factor_as_a_predictive_tool
Article Rank-normalized journal impact factor as a predictive tool
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