Academic return
A broader understanding of 'impact' could help governments to measure the diverse benefits of their investment in research.
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How can academia kick its addiction to the impact factor?
The impact factor is academia’s worst nightmare. So much has been written about its flaws, both in calculation and application, that there is little point in reiterating the same tired points here …
The Societal and Economic Impacts of Academic Research
A report produced by Digital Science, together with an international collaboration of leading higher education professionals and policy experts who give their views on the global impact agenda in research policy and discuss what evidence of impact is useful to them.
The unsung heroes of scientific software
Creators of computer programs that underpin experiments don’t always get their due — so the website Depsy is trying to track the impact of research code.
Impact is not importance
The use of journal impacts in evaluating individuals has its inherent dangers. In an ideal world, evaluators would read each article and make personal judgments.
I Like, I Cite? Do Facebook Likes Predict the Impact of Scientific Work?
Facebook likes only predict citations in the psychological area but not in the non-psychological area of business or in the field of life sciences.
Impact, not impact factor
The scientific community must not rely exclusively on the impact factors of journals.
Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted
Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted
Are there any lessons to be learnt from the field of healthcare quality which could improve our approach to assessing research quality?
Transparency promised for vilified impact factor
Thomson Reuters vows to be clearer about how science's most misused metric is calculated.
DORA's new "JIF-Less" Assessment Web Site
DORA is calling for the scientific community to contribute fresh JIF-less examples to the new DORA web page. Some procedures collected to date will affect scientists applying for positions at Europe's leading EMBO in Germany, at the NSF and at the NIH.
The mostly unread world of academic papers
According to one study, which was presumably read by more than three people, half of all academic papers are read by no more than three people.
Peering into Peer Review
Why don't proposals given better scores by the NIH lead to more important research outcomes?
Impactstory.org partners with Altmetric.com
Impactstory will be buying a new data stream: Twitter, G+, and Facebook data from Altmetric.com. Altmetric have spent years working on the thorny problem of connecting tweets with articles.
Tracking the dynamics of individual scientific impact
Typically papers appearing in journals with large values of the IF receive a high weight in such evaluations. However, at the end of the day one is interested in assessing the impact of individuals, rather than papers. Here we introduce Author Impact Factor (AIF), which is the extension of the IF to authors.
Manipulating Google Scholar metrics: simple, easy and tempting
Paper showing how to manipulate the Google Citations profiles of a research group through the creation of false documents that cite their documents, and consequently, the journals in which they have published modifying their H index.
Impact beyond the impact factor
The journal impact factor is an annually calculated number for each scientific journal, based on the average number of times its articles published in the two preceding years have been cited.
Atypical Combinations and Scientific Impact
How big a role do unconventional combinations of existing knowledge play in the impact of a scientific paper? A new study shows that the highest-impact papers were not the ones that had the greatest novelty, but had a combination of novelty and otherwise conventional combinations of prior work.
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