Impact factors in Ag journals are lower simply because the audience for the research is smaller. It has nothing to do with the quality of the research , at least for the top end ag journals. Coupled with this is an obvious discipline bias. For example, ecology is a classic example. Take a look and see how often an ag paper or an agro-ecology study is reported in the ecology journals. This occurs even though ecology was founded within the the agricultural discipline. Most non-ag Universities do not even carry ag journals in their libraries. Adding to this mix, is the ever present issue of journal impact polictics. There is a wide range of literature on this. Unfortunately, several government research granting agencies are telling researchers to publish in higher impact journals or risk loosing their grants. This is a completely ridiculus approach. It is important to publish your work in the appropriate journals for your discipline. You should ask yourself "What audience do I want to read my work". If the answer is " ag researchers throughout the world" ...then make it so.
So must have more points.
Agricultural Research in the field is very time-consuming, costly and are more fundamental and harder than many other sciences.
Less papers are published per year in agriculture because the research is on living organisms with their own life histories, take time to respond to selection and die unexpectedly when subjected to diseases and stress. Life science research takes a longer time period to complete than those in the physical sciences. Also the big bucks are in medical research not in traditional agricultural work..
Agronomic researcher are less than other field scientists, so the cited papers are fewer, and IF become very small.
Many reasons for low impact agriculture journals, mainly:
1) less no. of agriculture journals; mostly are open access;
2) less number of citations etc.
If the support of agricultural research. Human health and the fully will be.
The Tips that friends have pointed out, now what do we have to increase this rating؟؟؟!!!!!
Impact factors in Ag journals are lower simply because the audience for the research is smaller. It has nothing to do with the quality of the research , at least for the top end ag journals. Coupled with this is an obvious discipline bias. For example, ecology is a classic example. Take a look and see how often an ag paper or an agro-ecology study is reported in the ecology journals. This occurs even though ecology was founded within the the agricultural discipline. Most non-ag Universities do not even carry ag journals in their libraries. Adding to this mix, is the ever present issue of journal impact polictics. There is a wide range of literature on this. Unfortunately, several government research granting agencies are telling researchers to publish in higher impact journals or risk loosing their grants. This is a completely ridiculus approach. It is important to publish your work in the appropriate journals for your discipline. You should ask yourself "What audience do I want to read my work". If the answer is " ag researchers throughout the world" ...then make it so.
Thank you!
But for the culturalizing and creating positive change in governments approach and mentality of nations, agricultural researchers what to do?
We, the agricultural scientists, can help publicize one another's work by reading what our colleagues have published in life science based journals and by citing those that are of relevance in our own publications. All of us know that Open access journals can be read free of charge so the citation rates (and hence Impact Factors) of the better ones tend to be higher than those of comparable traditional subscription based journals. However, some traditional journals like the Pertanika Journal of Tropical Agricultural Science (http://pertanika.upm.edu.my) have also made the papers published in them accessible free of charge despite still not charging any publication fees as our contribution towards the advancement of agricultural research world wide. This is especially of importance to us in the developing countries where funds for paying journal publication charges to open access journals and for subscriptions to traditional journals are scarce. All the best in our efforts to advance agricultural research for the benefit of the whole of humanity.
Very Nice Mr Tan.
What are the Impact Factors agricultural research?
What is different from other disciplines?
Thanks Ali.
I interpret agricultural research as being any study on plants, animal and microbes of agricultural importance. I agree that even good agriculture based journal have rather low IF for example:
Theoretical and Applied Genetics =3.297, Animal Genetic =2.403, Crop Science=1.6, Soil Science =1.4, Australian Journal of Agricultural Research = 1.3, Journal of Genetics=1.1, Asian Australasian Journal of Animal Science=0.579,
Pertanika JTAS does not have ISI IF yet but it is listed in SCOPUS, BIOSIS, Agricola, EBSCO etc.
In contrast, the IF for Science =31, Nature =36, Lancet=34, Cell=32, Nature Biotechnology=23, BMC Medial Genetics=13, Biotechnology=11.
Another important thing is that if the journal is focused on REVIEW papers then the number of citations is increasing many-fold
In my opinion, the primary reason is that agricultural research is generally of a country to partake in work, habitat and climatic reasons, the results can be interpreted as the area, be recycled.
However, because the scientific publications requires ai Inpack factor should be set up and máködtetni these pages. An understanding of the results of the other, and the link that is our job.
Dear Ali,
Thank you very much for your interest.
The Pertanika Journal of Tropical Agricultural Science accepts manuscripts which are classified as regular or original articles,short communications and reviews. The journal aims to provide a forum for high quality research related to agriculture especially tropical agriculture. Areas relevant to the scope of the journal include: agricultural biotechnology, biochemistry, biology,ecology, fisheries,forestry, food sciences, genetics, plant and animal breeding, microbiology, pathology and management, physiology, plant and animal sciences, production of plants and animals of economic importance and veterinary science. Submissions will usually receive a decision within 12 weeks and there are four issues of the journal per year in February, May, August and November.
Do contact the Executive Editor, Dr, Nayan S. Deep Kanwal at :[email protected] if you have further questions regarding submission of manuscripts for possible publication in our journal.
Because review papers usually get more citations per paper than original articles.
One reason the leading agricultural science journals have low impact factors is the difference in how citations are distributed over time. The impact factor is calculated using the number of citations in the two years following publication. In the physical and medical sciences, many papers are cited for only a few years and then the field moves on and the paper becomes obsolete. In the agricultural sciences that obsolescence does not seem to set in. Many Agricultural Science Journals have citation half-lives over 10 years. Thus, these articles are cited quite a bit, but a much smaller proportion of those citations are included in the impact factor.
A second contributing cause is that articles in applied science may have an audience of practitioners. A paper that is influential in changing farming practices, with its message widely disseminated in the trade press, may not receive many citations in the applicable literature.
I agree with contribution of all, but in my own opinion is very unfair that some aspects like the years which are necesary for field trials (e.g.) are not consider in some impact factor. Because is easier to publish in some disciplines which include more lab trials than other disciplines with only field trials (e.g. vineyard, soil management, etc.) and without any posibility to correct the mistakes (in vegetal production, one year is usually the time that you have to wait for doing other replication)
Yes Mario, this is precisely why Impact Factor values for journals cannot and should not be compared across the board. They should be compared within the discipline. For example well respected journals in Agriculture like Animal Genetics and Theoretical and Applied Genetics have IF values of 2.4 and 4 respectively unlike Science, the New England Journal of Medicine and Nature which are in the 30s!
Mr Tan:
I agree completely with you and I think it's fair that you should not compare the impact index of areas among themselves, but at least here in Spain it is inevitable, and scientists which have lower impact index in some areas went slightly handicapped (lol).
By the way, 30 is amazing!
I agree with Thomas Björkman that due to difference in citation methodology the IP is lower for Ag journals. and also with S.Tan, that comparisons should be within the group and not across them. How can you compare journals like Nature or Science with IP at 30 with journals with regional perspective.
I also agree with Imre Csiha that agricultural research is generally of a country to partake in work, habitat and climatic reasons, the results can be interpreted as the area, be recycled and highly location specific, so it applicability in other regions is often not very relevant. This might also be one of the reasons for low citation from agricultural journals.
Thank you S.Tan for suggesting an article which is of sopus indexed, i think it will be so helpful for the research scholarsto publish their manuscripts . who are doing their research related to the agricultural.
Pratyu, as of 25 June 2013, you can submit your manuscript for publication in the PERTANIKA Journal of Tropical Agricultural Science (SCOPUS indexed) through the Thomson Reuter’s ScholarOne™ online submission and review system.via the following URL:
http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/upm-jtas
Most welcomed Dr. Singh. Please also note that the PERTANIKA Journal of Tropical Agricultural Science does not have page charges as it is a journal published by Universiti Putra Malaysia Press, Serdang, Malaysia. This journal is part of our university's efforts to help disseminate freely the results of quality agricultural and biological science research to life and agricultural scientists throughout the world. Issues of the journal can be viewed and papers read and downloaded for free through a link found at our university's website at www.upm.edu.my
Dr.S.Tan, thank you once again for this useful information, would be visiting the University website to see the journal and if possible would also like to contribute to this journal in future .
The important thing is to try publishing on the top journals of a given area, which would reflect the impact of your work withing that area. The only ways to compare IFs from different disciplines would be if them all comprised an equal number of researchers, journals, number of papers per year etc .... or, that each paper was allowed to cite only one single other reference. As every published paper cites dozens of other papers, mostlyy form the same field, an area with more researchers / published papers will EXPONENTIALLY rise the IF over areas with fewer people involved
I totally agree with Jaume;s views on IF. However, please do note that IF is actually the measure of a journal's impact on its field not the impact of a particular piece of work. A more appropriate measure of a paper's impact on its field of study should be its citation number..
I fully agree with Prof S Tan, that it is the article which should be vetted and not the journal, while assessing the impact of research. The citations of a particular piece of work by fellow researchers is the correct measure, however there should also be some weight given to the journal in which the article while assigning an Impact Factor so that a fair assessment can be made.
Impact factor of the journals based on the number of articles published in the past two years divided by number of cited articles published in the indexed journals in the current year. Impact factor of the journal may increase if the journal is in open access. If a journal journal is not in open access and publish good and innovative articles, these journals will not yield much impact factor . Most of the agricultural journals are paid journals (not in open access) and are in increasing numbers. Citation of these journals are scattered. So, the agricultural journals have low impact factor. Impact factor will not decide the quality of the articles published. Very good and novel articles may be published in un-indexed and very low or nil impact factor journals. Low value papers may be published in some impact factor journals by paying the processing / publication/ subscription charges for those journals. In my opinion impact factor will not be a factor to decide the quality of the journal or article. So you do not worry about the impact factor and concentrate only on the journals which are indexed and peer reviewed..
You hit the nail right on the head Dr. Chelliah. In the final analysis it is the citation number that will decide whether the paper has made an impact in its field of study or not,. NOT the impact factor of the journal that it is published in. For example the Lowry method cited over 200,000 times was published in 1951 in the j of Biological Chemistry which has a modest 2013 IF of 4.65.
The relative impact number is not important. It is important the "number" in the Field... see http://www.iipopescu.com/Jo_rankingb.htm
A silly number (IF) multiplied by another silly number (citations) gives another silly number. Measuring the quality of anything is always a difficult thing to do and it becomes increasingly difficult when the measures involved are abstractions. No one measures the quality of the audience, which surely must be where the impact is really important. Is fifty thousand citations from a high impact journal publication better than one citation from a low impact journal if the one person citing then goes on to win the Nobel Prize?
Gregor Mendel's little paper on genetics appeared in an obscure journal and nobody read it for years. The best paper I ever read was written by one man who published one paper from a thirty year career. It would be good to read some more good papers, rather than the soundbite publications that are stimulated by the IF system and institutional pressure to publish. Quality is not related to popularity (witness pop music), it has many intangible factors, so any attempt to measure the quality of a publication must necessarily be an approximation. Perhaps like democracy, it is a bad system, but the best bad system that we have devised so far?
Absolutely Dr Tan. People have known this for years. The big questions are what has to be done to make a better system and who is going to do it?
Social scientists are perpetually trying to measure quality in a variety of systems and over decades have had limited success. Where quality systems are employed, people begin to work to achieve the highest score in the system, rather than working towards genuine excellence. Where intellectual work is at stake, this has the effect of dumbing down as people are caught between a desire to do genuine quality work and an economic and status need to conform to the quality standards. Excellent examples of this are seen in the policies of Mao and Stalin.
There will never be a perfect means of measuring quality where the measurements are only quantifiable in a wooly manner, so it is probably sensible to recognise that every so often one imperfect system needs to be replaced by another, if only to prevent the drift to box ticking and loss of quality, that is an inevitable consequence of any system.
Viva la revolution! Who is going to start it?
Please note this: Agricultural research is location specific and you can't replicate it every where like chemistry/physics/medical research.
Tropical results cant be applicable to temperate and vice verse
I fully agree with Vishwanath Koti. Basic sciences (physics, chemistry, biochemistry, and so on) have advantages in terms of replication of results and methodologies, all over the World. Besides, if compared to medical research, in agricultural sciences we are involved with a great number of different spiecies of plants or animals, which are subjected to different environmental conditions (climate, soils, and cropping systems). As Dr. Swanton said "the ecology was founded within the agricultural discipline". It's correct. But, even in Crop Ecology, studies have sometimes a small range of application, in particular if involving a specific crop, in a specific climate condition.
I fully agree with witty opinions of Thomas Björkman and Homero Bergamaschi. If we will have a some patents and we try to introduce theirs through some papers then we could be decided this problem.
I think Clarence Swanton and Chellaiah Muthu gave good reasons. Relatively low audience and a quite wide and continuously increasing number of journals are main factors. I add that unfortunately Ag Sciences are considered "second level" sciences by scientists of other disciplines, because they are applied sciences. I heard many times biologists, chemists, ecologists.... arguing on agriculture without having any serious competence, but, since they are biologists, chemists, ecologists...they have the arrogance to consider themselves superior and do not consider and cite the scientific production of the Ag Scientists.
Agriculture science is an old discipline and so much of the groundbreaking work was done a long time ago. Robert Burns, the poet was offered a chair in Agriculture in the 18th century. The agricultural revolution predates the industrial revolution, evolved along with the industrial revolution and had a huge surge during the days of the green revolution. In the eyes of many, agricultural science has passed it's zenith, having achieved all that it needs to achieve a long time ago. Many subjects become less important after the important issues have been solved. Botany peaked in the 19th century, chemistry and physics possibly peaked some time in the 20th century, anatomy peaked in the 18th century?
Agricultural research still has importance, but for most people it is not a sexy subject. Bright young things want to talk about media studies, IT, or art at cocktail parties. You don't display your intellect by being knowledgeable about manure. It is not a good chat up line. Agriculture is literally a down to earth subject and most people give little thought to the origins of the substance that fills their belly, unless it is to express some fad about animal welfare, agricultural chemicals, or to complain about farming practice. Agriculture is not the current zeitgeist.
What Graeme said is absolutely true in the developed world. However, in most of the developing countries where most of the world's population are to be found, agriculture is still a matter of life or death. Whether you live another day or die of hunger depends on the success or failure of agricultural production. Hence, the survival of human life on planet earth as we know it today really still depends on the success or failure of agriculture. It is a pity that in the affluent world, agriculture is no longer cool but subject to control by big business! Accordingly the public resources that are devoted to agricultural research especially for basic food production is now very limited.
How true Dr Tan, in the pampered west it is easy to forget the rest of the world. Perhaps agriculture is not an issue, because it is just a different sort of factory. I suspect that lack of food in the world is mostly to do with political situations rather than inabilities to grow. Vested interests, lack of education and lack of alternative industries probably contribute more to lack of food than the low status and investment in agricultural research?
I agree to Dr Mochrie. Therefore knowledge sharing thru networking like this will surely attract more articles and document writings. Food security and seed security for example must be tackled efficiently, and this alone requires quality more writings with high impact values. Thanks.
I see that this discussion could be continued to endless. This is fact that AgScience is a very complicated and a large scale. Therefore, we should be get together and to find such suitable way when figuratively the sheep will be intact and at the same time the belly of wolves have had enough. Thanks to all!
ya its absolutely right, but the journals related to agri biotechnolgy are high rated as the science of agri biotech is considered as frontier science while the conventional agri technologies are not considered at par to them. Usually impact factor increases by citation so it also depends upon the number of researchers related to agriculture worldwide is less than other streams
I disagree with Dr. Tan. Impact factor of the journals are based on the publication and dissemination of research knowledge to the world of research. Here we should not compare the productivity and research of the developed or developing countries. The question is 'why the impact of agricultural ..". Most of the agricultural journals are from the developed countries but their impact factor is low compared to other field journals. I can agree with Dr. Tan's view little bit. Developed countries may provide enough funds to research. But we cannot predict all the developed countries will be able to publish good quality articles in agricultural research. Whether a country is developed or developing, the availability of experience and expertise persons will be the deciding factor for publication of good quality research papers..
Frankly speaking, It is just commercialization of Science through publishers is called Impact Factor a hidden factor for their commercial aspect. Let us take the journals a decade back or so. Do they possess any impact factor ? Do we call those personnel worked on those publication are not so great ?. A time to interrogate our Conscience to prevent outself from blindly carry over with IF.
@Udaya- We need to have some grading system for this era. Otherwise how can we asses the quality of research?
Sorry, my friends. But, I can see some prejudice behind some statements. Sometimes, the question is not a matter of quality or competence.
Good researchers may live in both developed or developing countries. Of course, most of famous researchers and institutions are from developed countries, where the history of research is longer and more rich than in developing regions. By the way, in my opinion, the history and experience (time) is a very important factor for research and knowledge, for both country or institution level. However, it appears that time is getting more and more faster, and the needs in science are getting more and more higher. For this reason, a rapid evolution in science and technology in developing countries is not so difficult or impossible, if priorities (and founds) are well established. For example, my country (Brazil) is now one of the most important exporters of foods (protein, in particular). European people, nowadays, is eating a lot of protein. And I am talking in terms of soybeans protein, directly or indirectly (dairy products, beef meat, porky meat, chickens, and so on). And, most of the soybean protein is produced in subtropical and tropical regions of Brazil and Argentina.
Well, everybody knows that soybeans was not cultivated in low latitudes, up to recent decades, because of limitations by photoperiod. So, who was responsible for the great expansion in soybean cultivation at low latitudes? Mostly, the Latin-American researchers and institutions. And, where are the research papers and rapports? Mostly, on regional journals and on proceedings of regional congresses and technical meetings. Well, most of those journals and proceedings were published in Portuguese or Spanish, with very low impact factors or even without any factor. A great part of those papers or rapport are unknown by the majority of the scientific community. Even thus, their results are providing a very significant "impact" in terms of food supply and incoming to farmers. But, obviosly, the previous experience was indispensable for that, and great part of it came from developing countries.
Our discussion can go to an endless way, but from that we can get more light to remain walking.
The Gregor Mendel factor! An obscure journal, but a very high impact factor in terms of how it has affected society. The research which wins Nobel prizes is often not recognised for its worth for years or decades after publication. IF generally reflects the zeitgeist in the scientific community and can be totally divorced from the importance of work on society. Commercialisation may better reflect the value of research, however there is a long tradition of science being the domain of gentlemen, so toys for the boys research is much more glamorous than mundane things like producing food. A Higgs Boson therefore remains much more sexy than a soyabean.
Most research on oil palm and rubber are done in the developing tropical countries of Southeast Asia, south America and sub- Saharan Africa. So too are work done on the Asian water buffalo, Bubalus bubalis. especially in India, China, Thailand and the Phillipines.Science is universal and work on different crops and animals are done in areas of the world where they are important. Let us not be biased when we cite the literature in our own research papers. Do refer to and cite the relevant articles resulting from work done in the developing world too instead of just those from the developed countries. Nowadays, journals from the developing countries like Brazil, Malaysia, India and China can be read online whether directly from the journal webpagee or from papers uploaded into web repositories like RESEARCHGATE and ACADEMIA. Hence, we must consciously try to overcome our own scientific biases and start referring to quality work especially in the agricultural sciences originating from both the developing as well as the developed world.
For an in-dept discussion on Journal Impact Factor and the fallacy of using it to gauge individual researcher''s performance and for hiring and promotion purposes please go to the website of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) at am.ascb.org/dora/. There you can also sign the DORA declaration which is briefly described thus:-
The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), initiated by the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) together with a group of editors and publishers of scholarly journals, recognizes the need to improve the ways in which the outputs of scientific research are evaluated. The group met in December 2012 during the ASCB Annual Meeting in San Francisco and subsequently circulated a draft declaration among various stakeholders. DORA as it now stands has benefited from input by many of the original signers listed below. It is a worldwide initiative covering all scholarly disciplines. We encourage individuals and organizations who are concerned about the appropriate assessment of scientific research to sign DORA.
The original purpose of IF is to help promote a particular journal to librarians so that they help recommend the journal for subscription to the powers that be. This is clearly stated in the declaration as follows:-
"The Journal Impact Factor is frequently used as the primary parameter with which to compare the scientific output of individuals and institutions. The Journal Impact Factor, as calculated by Thomson Reuters, was originally created as a tool to help librarians identify journals to purchase, not as a measure of the scientific quality of research in an article. With that in mind, it is critical to understand that the Journal Impact Factor has a number of well-documented deficiencies as a tool for research assessment. These limitations include: A) citation distributions within journals are highly skewed [1–3]; B) the properties of the Journal Impact Factor are field-specific: it is a composite of multiple, highly diverse article types, including primary research papers and reviews [1, 4]; C) Journal Impact Factors can be manipulated (or "gamed") by editorial policy [5]; and D) data used to calculate the Journal Impact Factors are neither transparent nor openly available to the public [4, 6, 7]."
Many of the above comments are true. We may look at the IF in different ways. Firstly, it could be as a screening tool for finding those journals that may have high quality that are attractive for many researches to publish their results. However, it is also a business for the publishers. There is currently a competition between the publishers to increase the IF of their journals to attract more papers and then sell them to third parties such as universities and research institutes. In fact it is not true to compare the IF of the journals in two or more scientific disciplines. Each discipline has it own number of audiences and researches. It is obvious that pure science is more attractive these days and therefore the IF of a journal such as Cell is high (31.96). On the other hand the IF of the Potato Research is 0.56. Much much lower! But as an agricultural researcher who works on potatoes I prefer to publish my work in the latter one or a similar related journal since those other potato researches may find my work in this one and not the Cell. So, IF is somehow a kind of misleading tool and criterion. To solve this problem and in order to scale down the value of the papers of each discipline a new journals metrics as SNIP and it is "Source-Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) measures contextual citation impact by weighting citations based on the total number of citations in a subject field. The impact of a single citation is given higher value in subject areas where citations are less likely, and vice versa." More information about this new metrics could be find at http://www.journalmetrics.com/snip.php
So, do your research a look for publishing your results in an appropriate journal and never let the IF get you lost. It is obvious that in a short time IF would be replaced by SNIP.
In my experience, impact factor does not necessarily relate to the quality of research. I have seen some dubious work that we and others have been unable to replicate in high impact journals, while there has been solid work published in journals of low impact, particularly in ag and hort. These days, I take each paper on its own merits or otherwise regardless of the status of the journal it is published in.
Mr. Daniel Hutchins has well said. His statement is entirely true in my experience. I have already stressed this view in my answer.
The answer in few points:
If the case of low impact factors in agric. journals as stated by Mohammaad N,
Clarence J Swanton, Elnesrthen. Thomas Björkman and others, then how can we get out of this dilema?
Agriculture scientists in the developing world should start citing one another's work whenever and wherever relevant instead of just citing papers from the developed countries.
For tropical agriculture especially, work done in the tropics and published in regional or local journals are often more relevant than those done in temperate countries and published in international journals. If we, the agricultural scientists in the tropics ,do not cite our own work, who will then?
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Agriculture