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Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Impact factors and journal prices: no apparent correlation

Bill Hooker has used Elsevier data to show that there is "no apparent correlation between IF [impact factor] and price."  Excerpt:

...Interesting, no? If the primary measure of a journal's value is its impact -- pretty layouts and a good Employment section and so on being presumably secondary -- and if the Impact Factor is a measure of impact, and if publishers are making a good faith effort to offer value for money -- then why is there no apparent relationship between IF and journal prices? After all, publishers tout the Impact Factors of their offerings whenever they're asked to justify their prices or the latest round of increases in same.

There's even some evidence from the same dataset that Impact Factors do influence journal pricing, at least in a "we can charge more if we have one" kinda way. Comparing the prices of journals with or without IFs indicates that, within this Elsevier/Life Sciences set, journals with IFs are higher priced and less variable in price....

Comment.  Also see White and Creaser 2007, which showed little correlation between price and impact factor.  Bergstrom and Bergstrom 2004 showed that journal prices are either unrelated to citation impact or inversely related to it:

[L]ibraries typically must pay 4 to 6 times as much per page for journals owned by commercial publishers as for journals owned by non-profit societies. These differences in price do not reflect differences in the quality of the journals [as measured by citations]. In fact the commercial journals are on average less cited than the non-profits and the average cost per citation of commercial journals ranges from 5 to 15 times as high as that of their non-profit counterparts.

Update (3/10/09).  Also see Part 2 of Bill's investigation.  Excerpt:

Following on from this post, and in the spirit of eating my own dogfood, herewith the first part of my analysis of the U Cali OSC dataset.

The dataset includes some 3137 titles with accompanying information about publisher, list price, ISI impact factor, UC online uses and average annual price increase; these measures are defined here. The spreadsheet and powerpoint files I used to make the figures below are available here: spreadsheet, ppt.

As a first pass, I've simply made pairwise comparisons between impact factor, price and online use. There's no apparent correlation between impact factor and price, for either the full set or a subset defined by IF and price cutoffs designed to remove "extremes"....

One other thing that stands out is the cluster of Elsevier journals in the high-price, low-impact quadrant, and the Nature groupsmaller cluster of NPG's highest IF titles at the opposite extreme....

Next I asked whether there was any clearer connection between price and online uses aggregated over all UC campuses....[Answer:] Again, not so much....

Finally (for the moment) I played the Everest ("because it's there") card and plotted use against impact factor....The relationship here is still weak, but noticeably stronger than for the other two comparisons -- particularly once we eliminate the Nature outlier....