Aleksey Belikov•2016-07-10 10:21 AM
I totally agree with Dr. Waltman: denying the practicality of impact factors is the same as denying the practicality of academic publishing, editorial selection and peer review. Both single numbers and distributions are needed. Distributions can not be easily compared - it will anyway be required to calculate the median or the mode from it, which (while presumably being more appropriate than the mean) are still single numbers. And yet it is not clear whether they really describe these distributions in the best possible way, or other single-number metric is more appropriate to characterize a journal as a whole. When one looks at long lists of journals and wants to sort them by impact, how would one do this without a single number for each journal? As showed in that paper, current technology easily permits to create distributions to anyone interested in particular journal, but for quick sifting through large lists of journals, single numbers are unbeatable. As for the evaluation of individual researchers, much better indicators exist, such as the h-index, the L-index and the S-index.
Aleksey Belikov•2016-07-10 10:21 AMI totally agree with Dr. Waltman: denying the practicality of impact factors is the same as denying the practicality of academic publishing, editorial selection and peer review. Both single numbers and distributions are needed. Distributions can not be easily compared - it will anyway be required to calculate the median or the mode from it, which (while presumably being more appropriate than the mean) are still single numbers. And yet it is not clear whether they really describe these distributions in the best possible way, or other single-number metric is more appropriate to characterize a journal as a whole. When one looks at long lists of journals and wants to sort them by impact, how would one do this without a single number for each journal? As showed in that paper, current technology easily permits to create distributions to anyone interested in particular journal, but for quick sifting through large lists of journals, single numbers are unbeatable. As for the evaluation of individual researchers, much better indicators exist, such as the h-index, the L-index and the S-index.
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