I don't think URL clicks changes the impact factor, but it does probably do something just or maybe even more important. It changes the algorithm for the Page ranking in the Google universe. Each unique click on a URL raises the ranking of a particular article both on Google and on Google scholar. This indirectly helps with impact factors. Let's say I'm looking for an article on culture and ideology for a paper I am writing. This is not the major thrust of my article but it is an idea I would like to deal with. I go to Google scholar and type in the search words culture and ideology and a number of articles come up in Page ranking order. I will begin clicking starting with the first article (unless something draws me to a second or third article). If I don't find what I want in the first I will go to the second and then the third. Research tends to show that by the third click I will have either found what I want or will start a new search. Notice something else, which is that I click on the URLs of the top ranked article, so once an article reaches the top of the list it can stay there a long time simply by virtue of being at the top of the list because so many people are clicking on it. People then will tend to use these articles as citations in their work. It's all pretty fascinating. A couple of caveats. I would suggest that not so much emphasis be put on ISI. There was a recent article (funny I don't have the link but you could probably Google it!!) suggesting that Google scholar is at least as good a method for determination of an article's impact as ISI. Because Google Scholar is so much easier to use my guess is it will soon displace ISI. The other caveat is that Google knows that people are trying to manipulate the rankings and work that into their alogrithms (something ISI is not so good at doing), so trying to manipulate can be something of a fool's errand. Michael ________________________________ From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu on behalf of Gregory Allan Thompson Sent: Mon 9/27/2010 2:31 PM To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu Subject: [xmca] MCA Impact Factor Just read an email from another list serve that was suggesting ways to increase the impact fact of their journal (Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, JCE), and some of the suggestions seemed useful for MCA (I recall a discussion about this in the past year or two). Here are there two suggestions for increasing the impact factor of MCA. 1. Have people (students, colleagues, etc.) access via the URL rather than supplying them with the PDF file. According to the JCE editor who passed this along, "each 'unique user' accessing an article by clicking on the pertinent URL link enhances the journal's impact factor. 2. Subscribe to email alerts for the journal. It looks like you have to create an account (free) in order to subscribe to email alerts for MCA. Regarding the first suggestion, I wonder if anyone knows about the relevance of the first suggestion, and whether or not this is something that should be taken into consideration when circulating papers (maybe send the link AND a PDF just in case?). Seemed like it was potentially useful for MCA, but I don't know enough about the ins and outs of journal management to know if this is useful or not. Anyone know more about the details? cheers, greg _______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
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