The DFG is a very progressive and modern funding agency. More than two years ago, the main German science funding agency signed the “Declaration on Research Assessment” DORA. The first point of this declaration reads “Do not use journal-based metrics […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Posts Tagged impact factor
Although a case can be made for rewarding scientists for risky, novel science rather than for incremental, reliable science, novelty without reliability ceases to be science. The currently available evidence suggests that the most prestigious journals are no better at […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
In which journal a scientist publishes is considered one of the most crucial factors determining their career. The underlying common assumption is that only the best scientists manage to publish in a highly selective tier of the most prestigious journals. […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Even without retractions, ‘top’ journals publish the least reliable science
In: science politicstl;dr: Data from thousands of non-retracted articles indicate that experiments published in higher-ranking journals are less reliable than those reported in ‘lesser’ journals. Vox health reporter Julia Belluz has recently covered the reliability of peer-review. In her follow-up piece, she […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Over the last decade or two, there have been multiple accounts of how publishers have negotiated the impact factors of their journals with the “Institute for Scientific Information” (ISI), both before it was bought by Thomson Reuters and after. This […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
In the last “Science Weekly” podcast from the Guardian, the topic was retractions. At about 20:29 into the episode, Hannah Devlin asked, whether the reason ‘top’ journals retract more articles may be because of increased scrutiny there. The underlying assumption […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I recently was sent a report from a university-wide working group on the publishing habits within the Freie Universität Berlin. I don’t think this document is available online, but I think I’m not doing anything illegal if I publish some […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
In what area of scholarship are repeated replications of always the same experiment every time published and then received with surprise, only to immediately be completely ignored until the next study? Point in case from an area that ought to […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Yesterday, Science Magazine published a news story (not a peer-reviewed paper) by Gonzo-Scientist John Bohannon on a sting operation in which a journalist submitted a bogus manuscript to 304 open access journals (observe that no toll access control group was […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I’ve just been invited to edit a special issue in the MDPI journal ‘publications‘ on a topic I can specify. If I do it, I thought it should revolve around replacing journal rank (i.e., altmetrics, ALM, etc.) and other (technical?) […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…