Matthew J. Cockerill, Delayed impact: ISI's citation tracking choices are keeping scientists in the dark, BMC Bioinformatics 5, 93 (2004). Cockerill editorializes that ISI's impact factor system harms new (and particularly open access) journals since ISI may not begin following a journal for perhaps two years and then won't rank its impact until at least two years after. He uses BMC Bioinformatics as an example, showing that ISI began tracking it in 2002, but impact statistics may not be released until 2005. Many scientists consider a journal's impact factor before submitting their work. Cockerill demonstrates how BMC Bioinfomatics "unofficial" impact factor, calculated with ISI's criteria, gives the journal a favorable ranking. He writes optimistically that soon ISI will face competition in the citation analysis area (e.g CiteBase, Elsevier's Scopus, among others) and argues "ISI should reconsider its policy on citation tracking, and should introduce a policy of immediately tracking any peer-reviewed journal that meets basic quality standards and which can provide reference list data in an appropriate form to allow automated analysis."
Posted by
Garrett at 7/12/2004 11:38:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
