The clearest, most nicely written post on the entire issue. Well done! - Bora Zivkovic

submitted to Open Lab 09 - Bora Zivkovic

Shirley - this is an excellent essay on this topic, which is very close to my heart. Well done! - Peter Binfield

Shirley, excellent (LONG) post. Can't wait to read your books ;) - Ricardo Vidal

Thanks! This took me a couple days pretty much full-time to write (the luxury of not working a job right now); how do people with jobs do this?? - Shirley Wu

Tom Roud (?) writes an interesting rebuttal against article-level metrics - or at least cautions against some of the metrics that might be used (such as blog and media coverage). It's in French but I used Google translator to read it. My memory of high school French classes only allowed me to decipher the first paragraph, and get the gist that it was an argument against. http://tomroud.com/2009... - Shirley Wu

The post on tomroud.com is interesting. Both your response on his post and the comment by Mitch on your post address most of his concerns, methinks. Popularity contests are no good, but there are ways around them (Mitch), they are just one of many metrics to be used with caution (PLoS), and GlamourMagz are also popularity contests where quirky papers have no chance (you). But his thesis depends on the idea that people find papers by reading journals. I guess there are still some dinosaurs that do it that way (and ONLY that way), but most people now find papers through search engines, while the enlightened few find them via new social networking places, i.e., human filters (e.g., Mendeley, FriendFeed). If everyone discovered papers via searches or networks, his argument would have no basis. But of course, some people do, some people don't, and probably most people do some kind of combo. Heck, even I (not even in the lab any more) receive the hard copy of J of Biological Rhythms (that's the only journal I get in hardcopy, because I am a society member) and yes, I try to read it cover-to-cover. But I still find most of the interesting papers via searches and FF. - Bora Zivkovic

@shirley: how do we do it? In pieces over many days... - Björn Brembs

or get a job where writing this stuff is what you are supposed to be doing ;-) - Bora Zivkovic

Having read the piece, I actually have some less vacuous comments: 1. To my knowledge, Garfield introduced the IF to help librarians cut subscriptions, not for scientists to help them chose publishing venues? 2. As you point out, journal level metrics are mathematically inadequate for what they are used for now. However, Thomson's IF specifically is worthless because it is negotiable and irreproducible, long before it is mathematically unsound. 3. What enrages me about the resistance to the extinction of journals is that the filtering we could have is actually so much better than what we have now. It's like saying: "I don't care how many kW your engine may have, you still have to put horses in front of that car (or masts and sails on that ship or whatever)!" - Björn Brembs

I think recent interview with Pete Binfield is a good addition to this thread at this point: http://network.nature.com/people... - Bora Zivkovic