9 replies to this topic

[Foogoo]

http://library.ucr.e...entomology.html

http://archive.scien.../10/jul18-10_1/

 

Is it simply a matter of entomological research dwindling since a few decades ago?

[LC3]

Seems like the amount of money dedicated to Science these days in general are dwindling

Edited by LC3, October 10 2015 - 1:54 AM.

[Michaelofvancouver]

Ummm I'm curious, how are these impact ratings measured, and what do they mean?

[Foogoo]

Impact factor. I keep calling it rating. In a nutshell, higher = more reputable, at least that's how most researchers interpret it.

[Subverted]

A large part of entomology journals is taxonomic publications...revisions that take multiple years to perform. Another large part of entomology publications are natural history studies (though much less common in recent history).

 

Unfortunately specialized articles (as most ento publications are) don't get a whole lot of citations, at least not citations very soon after they were published which afaik are the most important thing to calculating impact.

[Michaelofvancouver]

Oh, thanks for clarifying what it means.

[JakobS]

And simply because many entomology journals do not have a high impact factor, doesn't mean many entomology articles aren't being highly cited. Many entomologists will attempt to publish in high impact general science publications such as PNAS, Science, Nature, etc, before trying for entomology journals, except when they know the article has a very specific and limited focus that these publications would not be interested in. Entomology is far from being cast into the far reaches of academic journals, and is often found, if not every month, than every other in some of the most popular, and highest impact factor journals around. 

Edited by JakobS, October 12 2015 - 6:29 AM.

[john.harrold]

Impact factors have historically been a measure of the audience for the journal. I haven't looked at it since grad school, but it boils down largely to how often articles from that journal are cited. There are other factors, but the number of citations is a good way to think of it. I think it was more important before the internet. Back then, universities stocked fewer journals and the impact factor was a selling point. The distributor for the International Journal of Toe Fungus (IJTF) might tell you: "If you subscribe to the IJTF it will be more useful to your researchers because we have an impact factor of 1.75. The American Society of Toe Fungus only has an impact factor of 1.23, so you might as well be throwing your money in the trash." Libraries would stock the higher impact journals, so authors would push their work in that direction hoping their articles would be more likely to be read. 

 

This is still somewhat true. If you can get your toe fungus article in PNAS or Science, then you're much more likely to be read. Now the articles in those journals are not going to have the technical depth that a specialized journal will have. Speaking solely as a research scientist, impact factors are really not that important. The most important thing for me as a producer of content is that the journals I submit to are in indexed by the search engines that matter. I don't know what it is for entomology journals, but for me it's PubMed. As long as you can search for what I'm doing and it shows in PubMed, then the people who I want to get the information will get it. They might not have access to the specific journal, but they can just email me and get a PDF . As a consumer, I feel the same way. I don't care if your journal has an impact factor of 1.5 or 15, as long as it has a descent review process and the information is generally accurate, then I'll read your articles. I'm promiscuous that way. My wife disagrees vehemently on this, but she's in a field where they horde their work for years to get it into something like Cancer Cell (impact factor of 23.523, yes out to the thousandths). 

 

I started grad school in the late 90s. This was just when journals were starting to put their stuff online. I remember submitting searches to the chem abstracts though terminals, digging through stacks of journals, spending evenings photocopying articles and filling out inter-library loan requests. Now I open up Papers (that's the name of the program), construct tokenized searches of multiple online sources simultaneously, and I'm taken to a page where I can just download the PDF. If it's not part of a subscription at work, I can just order it and it'll come in a couple days. If it's personal, I can email a friend at a different institution and they can normally get it pretty quick. 

 

So with the journals going online, the barrier to finding information had dropped significantly. I wouldn't take the lower numbers for entomology journals too badly. They are fairly specialized and not a lot of folks are going to read them.

Edited by john.harrold, October 12 2015 - 10:47 PM.

[Foogoo]

Thanks for all the input. As I read more into it, I also started getting the feeling that impact factors are not that crucial, especially when you look at how Hindawi lost their impact factor of all their journals one year because of an issue with two articles of one journal. So Psyche was 0.00, despite having no connection to the Korea University Dept. of Neurosurgery and Cell Transplantation.

 

It did concern me when the first thing my professor friend looked at was the impact factor of a journal I mentioned, which makes me wonder who else in academia also has that state of mind. 

[JakobS]

Impact factors are considered by many academics when sending papers out to journals, I wouldn't say they are the most important aspect that is considered when publishing, but they definitely are part of the equation in figuring out how best to get a paper accepted by a journal. Academics do want their papers to be cited, so being able to get published in a journal that is seen by a larger group of fellow academics helps that effort.