nodalpoint.org - Bioinformatics Impact Factors - Comments

agreed

Neil — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 20:47:06 -0500

IMHO, screen-scraping this kind of data is a mugs game

I'm with you there. Scraping seems to be the basis of Zotero, which everyone is talking about just now. Broken scraping seems to be the reason for its current inability to import from PubMed/HubMed.

Having said that, I just wrote a scraper to pull hundreds of fasta files from an online genome database. It was a one-off though, honest.

Screen Scraping Hell

Duncan — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 11:57:45 -0500

IMHO, screen-scraping this kind of data is a mugs game, or as Lincoln Stein once put it: mediaeval torture, best left as a task for the sado-masochists, who actually like having to repeatedly rewrite their code!

Rise of BMC

Neil — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 04:09:29 -0500

...young upstart BioMed Central Bioinformatics...

I like all of the BMC Journals and on the whole, rate BMC Bioinformatics over Bioinformatics. The latter journal has become almost solely a methods/algorithms journal, whereas the former has a lot more interest in terms of application to real biological problems.

And yet - look at the problems that the BMC journals had initially in getting established - all because noone could figure out how impact factors applied to free, online articles! The nonsense that is impact factors, once again.

Digestability

chris — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 15:02:14 -0500

Probably because a single, simple metric has intuitive appeal. Eugene Garfield, the guy behind IFs, has commented on their use and abuse in JAMA and on the Thomson website (pdf). There's quite a large literature critical of whole concept, too.

What a mess

Duncan — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 05:58:49 -0500

Yeah, impact factors are always horribly out of date, are difficult to get hold of, often misleading and in the hands of a for-profit organisation that is responsible primarily to its shareholders. How did research assessment become so overly dependent on such figures?

Good work

Neil — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 21:58:16 -0500

Everything about impact factors is ridiculous - the difficulty in obtaining what should be freely-available and up to date data is perhaps the most ridiculous aspect. Thanks for the list.

Given that many journal webpages now display their impact factor, I wonder how many could be obtained using scrapers?

Bioinformatics Impact Factors

Duncan — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 13:18:34 -0500

There are all sorts of flaws with using impact factors for judging the quality of biomedical research. Love them or hate them, just getting hold of impact factors for journals in bioinformatics and related fields is much harder than it should be, so I thought I'd reproduce some statistics I gathered here. The rankings, which you should use with caution [1,2], are the latest as of June 2006 (and apply to citations in 2005) courtesy of Journal Citation Reports®, part of Thomson ISI Web of Knowledge. JCR has a pretty horrible clunky web interface when compared to some of its rivals [3,4], maybe one day they'll make it better. Anyway, this is not a comprehensive list, just a fairly random selection of bioinformatics and computer science journals that publish articles I've been reading the last few years.