The Great Curve: Citation distributions

This post follows on from a previous post on citation distributions and the wrongness of Impact Factor. Stephen Curry had previously made the call that journals should “show us the data” that underlie the much-maligned Journal Impact Factor (JIF). However, this call made me wonder what “showing us the data” would look like and how journals might […]

Tips from the blog IV – averaging

I put a recent code snippet put up on the IgorExchange. It’s a simple procedure for averaging a set of 1D waves and putting the results in a new wave. The difference between this code and Average Waves.ipf (which ships with Igor) is that this function takes the average of all points in the wave and […]

Wrong Number: A closer look at Impact Factors

This is a long post about Journal Impact Factors. Thanks to Stephen Curry for encouraging me to post this. tl;dr — I really liked this recent tweet from Stat Fact It’s a great illustration of why reporting means for skewed distributions is a bad idea. And this brings us quickly to Thomson-Reuters’ Journal Impact Factor […]