nodalpoint.org - impact factor - Comments

Free access to NSNPAS in PubMedCentral?

Duncan — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 04:12:22 -0500

Nature, Science and OUP Bioinformatics are all absent from this NIH list of Journals That Submit Articles To PubMed Central, more details from alf on hublog.

Talking of PubMedCentral, if you haven't seen it already Building a GenBank of the Published Literature published in Science back in 2001 is an interesting read, along with the responses tracked in PubMed.

re: DOI for authors

gbilder — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 12:15:24 -0400

Just wanted to clarify that what the "board approved" was for CrossRef to go ahead an investigate creating a distributed contributor id service. They have not approved the launch of a service- yet. Having said that, this is something that everybody *really* wants and we are working quickly to get a prototype together. The service would look kind of like the current RePEc system, but would also include an OpenID component. Naturally, the other advantage it would have is that it would work across disciplines, etc. I expect we'll have more news by the end of the year.

--G

Unique Author Identification

Duncan — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 09:37:16 -0400

So, Geoffrey Bilder tells me that CrossRef are working on DOI for Authors, and have "board level approval" to go ahead with it. There is also some group working on DAI: Digital Author Identification, but their solution is not truly distributed. These solutions need to integrate with OpenID.

One day science will grow

Greg — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 16:04:18 -0500

One day science will grow out of this. Researchers everywhere need to rise up and shout.

True. If we all keep on message, change will come slowly.

author IDs

Neil — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 10:47:12 -0500

Yeah, it's all about unique author IDs. When?

It's also about the nonsense that is the impact factor. We all know that there are many more measures of research impact than top-tier publications, but we keep living this lie. Why? Because it makes life easier for administrators - a nice, simple metric for their funding assessments. One day science will grow out of this. Researchers everywhere need to rise up and shout.

Perhaps this score should be the ratio of true positive/false positive, giving me a 1/8; it all depends how many initials you care to use ;)

Very nice.

Greg — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 10:20:33 -0500

Interesting to see the unique id for pubmed authors bug (feature?) cropping up again.

I'd have more to say, but I'm busy getting the upgrade working. Hopefully with facilities for posting images with stories as a built in features...

Nice one

Animesh — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 03:46:57 -0500

As I was reading through, I realized that we face it everyday. To be established in the field we do need NSPNAS > 0. But I do realize that people who assess the CV, look at the number of cross-reference (and how many people refer your article) to the publication too. So even if NSPNAS score is 0 (my present status), if you really have written a good paper, you will get the credit anyways (unless you are writing a stuff which the gang-of-editors are not able to gulp, like that H.pylori-GastricUlcer thing).

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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?