Impact factors

A word about the impact factor

Certainly, everyone tries to publish in high impact factor journals.

But, the amount of funding (if you aim to publish as open access), swimming against the stream, might prevent you from publishing in a high impact journal.

I have been shocked by an recent discussion with someone who told me that my recent paper: "Public Misunderstanding of genetically modified organisms: How science and society are interconnected," (http://ijlssr.com/currentissue/IJLSSR-1190.pdf ) does not count as it is not published in a high ranking journal.

Now, if he/she would be a bureaucrat, I could accept his/her wrong judgment, but he/she is a scientist. He/she even did not read the publication to ensure the quality of publication.

As scientist, we should never fall in the trap of impact factors, we should use our critical literacy, read the publications and judge afterwards.

I am still deeply shocked about the non-scientific thinking of this particular person.

I do not claim that my paper is the best paper written about GMOs, neither it is the worth paper ever written, but, as it enables a new viewpoint, it is interesting. I wanted to publish it as "open access"; however, my funding is too low, which prevents the publication in higher impact journals.

Anyhow, this is only my case.

(By the way, my publication is downloaded several times at Academia.edu; thus, it counts.)

In mathematics an even worthier case has just been revealed.

Thomas Royen published a paper about the proof of Gaussian correlation; unfortunately, he could publish it only at the Far East Journal of Theoretical Statistics.

According to the person who judges my publication purely on impact factor:

Forget it, it does not count; it is published in a low impact factor journal.

However, it is a really important publication, and mathematician worldwide are shocked that they missed this scientist.

To make matter worth, at first he could not publish this important finding as it has been written in word and not in Latex.

"Come on, science should count, not spelling errors, formatting errors."

In summary:

Impact factors are evaluation metrics, but far from perfect.

As scientist, read first and then judge (otherwise you are not a scientist!).

Furthermore, if you find an interesting paper in a low ranking journal, publish it online (Linkedin, Facebook,Twitter) that it finally retains the attention it deserves.

The New Media are powerful, and we can use them to correct errors in evaluation metrics.

(This help scientist who do not have the funding’s and networks and will destroy barriers in science.)