There is an entertaining rumour going around about the journal Nature Communications. When I heard it for the fourth or fifth time, I decided to check out whether there is any truth in it. The rumour goes something like this: the impact factor of Nature Communications is driven by physical sciences papers. Sometimes it is […]
Tag: Impact Factor
If I Can’t Change Your Mind
I have written previously about Journal Impact Factors (here and here). The response to these articles has been great and earlier this year I was asked to write something about JIFs and citation distributions for one of my favourite journals. I agreed and set to work. Things started off so well. A title came straight to mind. In the […]
Throes of Rejection: No link between rejection rates and impact?
I was interested in the analysis by Frontiers on the lack of a correlation between the rejection rate of a journal and the “impact” (as measured by the JIF). There’s a nice follow here at Science Open. The Times Higher Education Supplement also reported on this with the line that “mass rejection of research papers by […]
The Great Curve II: Citation distributions and reverse engineering the JIF
There have been calls for journals to publish the distribution of citations to the papers they publish (1 2 3). The idea is to turn the focus away from just one number – the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) – and to look at all the data. Some journals have responded by publishing the data that underlie the JIF […]
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 […]