What impact? Whose value? Citation metrics in a work-flow perspective

James Pringle

doi:10.1629/20192

Abstract

Serials: The Journal for the Serials Community has been digitised and can be accessed in full on this website. All content is freely available on an open-access basis. Serials was published between 1988 and 2011. In 2012, the journal was retitled and is now published as Insights: the UKSG journal.

Highlights

I will begin, in the Shakespearean spirit introduced by the title of this colloquium, by amending Mark Antony: Friends, publishers, information professionals, lend me your ears; It appears that we come to bury the journal impact factor, not to praise it
Many scholarly articles and blogs have told you that the journal impact factor (JIF) is flawed
The JIF does not cease each day to answer for its crimes, and we cannot read far in the literature without encountering a new criticism, a new proposal, a new alternative metric, a new funeral for the JIF

Summary

Introduction

I will begin, in the Shakespearean spirit introduced by the title of this colloquium, by amending Mark Antony: Friends, publishers, information professionals, lend me your ears; It appears that we come to bury the journal impact factor, not to praise it. William R Brody, President of The Johns Hopkins University, recently called this a result of ‘IT/IT’– cheap international travel and information technology.[5] As he notes, ‘Today, knowledge is disseminated in seconds ...’ and he further notes that ‘expertise is measured on a global rather than local scale’ This means that a researcher who presented a conference paper last week in Madrid finds that paper is being discussed in Taipei thanks to an e-mail, listserv, or conference posting, and it will week be referenced at a meeting in Beijing. The research article, as published in a scholarly journal, is less and less at the forefront of this communication chain, and increasingly at the end point – the researcher’s reputation grows faster than his publication list, and is based on a multiplicity of new types of documents and Collaboration These trends might seem to bode well for the heroic scientist, seemingly reinvented for the 21st century as a scholarly entrepreneur. Recent reports from the National Institutes of Health clearly illustrate this trend.[7]

The new search for value

What should we do?