Re: [xmca] Publish or Perish indices

Do Americans count books in their rankings? In South Africa, we finally
persuaded the powers that be that writing a book meant that you are
recognised as some kind of expert. It used to only be ISI publications.
Carol

On 05/11/2007, David Preiss <davidpreiss@uc.cl> wrote:
>
> Hi Peter,
>
> I think that, as always, everything depends on context. I know of
> places that use the impact factor of journals to estimate economic
> incentives for academic publications. If we follow this policy
> strictly we better don't do any research on education at all and jump
> into more lucrative fields such as neuroscience (please read
> ironically) . What goes wrong with this policy, and softer ones such
> as assesing an academic according to the journals where he or she
> publishes, is that nobody care about the IDEAS the person is thinking
> and everything get reduced to superficial quantitative measures. So
> someone can be a JPSP author instead of a social psychologist that
> studies prejudice, for instance. How would have been rated, for
> instance, Jean Piaget's books according to these rankings? Or
> Vygotsky's? Or Freud's? Most of their contributions are not in
> journals but in enduring books, that old and neglected medium for
> thinking.
> David
>
>
> On Nov 5, 2007, at 11:05 AM, Wolff-Michael Roth wrote:
>
> > Hi Peter, thanks for your comments. David IS right in some sense,
> > as I get frequent requests for measures of quality, often times
> > what our rejection rate is, when people come up for tenure. Tenure
> > committees, too, contact me to find out about rejection rates. And
> > I don't think this is a good measure for the quality of a journal.
> > Cheers,
> > Michael
> >
> >
> > On 5-Nov-07, at 2:49 AM, Peter Smagorinsky wrote:
> >
> > David, I think you overstate the case. Many people are taking
> > risks--just check
> > the vitas of the people on this list. And I've found that journals
> > are very
> > receptive to out-of-the-box studies, as long as they're done with
> > sufficient
> > rigor, and with rigor broadly defined.
> >
> > While impact ratings carry some weight, I've never heard them used
> > in any
> > tenure/promotion cases at 2 universities. Rather, journal
> > reputations carry
> > weight. And so MCA's rep matters more than its impact rating.
> >
> > Like many of you, I'm on several editorial boards and so don't see
> > any reason to
> > cite work just because it's published in a particular journal; I
> > try to cite whatever
> > informs my work. If MCA articles fit that profile, then they get
> > cited, but not
> > gratuitously to elevate an impact score. If boosting that score is
> > an editorial
> > goal, then the best approach is to continue publishing scholarship
> > that has an
> > impact on other people's thinking and writing.
> >
> > Peter
> >
> > ---- Original message ----
> >> Date: Mon, 5 Nov 2007 02:19:00 -0300
> >> From: David Preiss <davidpreiss@uc.cl>
> >> Subject: Re: [xmca] Publish or Perish indices
> >> To: mcole@weber.ucsd.edu, "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity"
> > <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> >>
> >> Mike,
> >>
> >> Echoing your words, it never stops to astonish me how the use of
> >> these indexes is transforming university activity in a very negative
> >> way. In my opinion, the first impact of ISI is that nobody can take
> >> risks, nobody can get out of the mainstream, and... nobody can do
> >> science in any language that is not English. I wonder when these
> >> indexes started to become so popular, as to settle as the final
> >> criterion to judge the intellectual productivity of an academic and
> >> to become standards to be imitated by the developing world.
> >>
> >> I really would love to learn about what the most experienced people
> >> in this list have to say about the use of ISI and how the inclusion
> >> of the Internet radicalized the "indexation" of human intellect.
> >> There is a real cultural-historical process behind it and I can think
> >> of a very nice application of Yrjö Engëstrom diagrams to the nature
> >> of academic life these days. A new ivory tower, whose ceiling is the
> >> impact factor of a journal?
> >> David
> >>
> >>
> >> On Nov 4, 2007, at 10:45 PM, Mike Cole wrote:
> >>
> >>> Very helpful, Michael.
> >>> The "publish or perish site," as Peter noted, is interesting. It is
> >>> not
> >>> error free. You need to go through their "hits" and clean it
> >>> up but it includes a LOT of pubs that ISI does not touch. Of
> >>> course, given
> >>> the "join our fraternity of experts" role of ISI that may
> >>> not cut it with everyone, but the additional info is important.
> >>>
> >>> Meantime, how about we get great research done that transforms the
> >>> world.
> >>> People might recognize it has happened (of course,
> >>> given the retrospective nature of such recognition we will not be
> >>> around to
> >>> witness it, but think how happy our progeny will be!)
> >>> :-)
> >>> mike
> >>>
> >>> On Nov 4, 2007 5:25 PM, Wolff-Michael Roth <mroth@uvic.ca> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> Hi all,
> >>>> further to the issue of how to get our journal more valorized. Here
> >>>> the Thompson information in impact factor, which is the factor most
> >>>> scientists consider to be the important thing to watch (SCIENCE has
> >>>> IF=30, NATURE IF=27, J LEARN SCI IF~3). Here is how it is
> >>>> calculated
> >>>>
> >>>> Figure 1: Calculation for journal impact factor.
> >>>> A= total cites in 2006
> >>>> B= 2006 cites to articles published in 2004-5 (this is a subset
> >>>> of A)
> >>>> C= number of articles published in 2004-5
> >>>> D= B/C = 2006 impact factor
> >>>>
> >>>> I did a quick count. In 2006, we had B=11 cites to articles
> >>>> published
> >>>> in 2004-5
> >>>> We had published C=(I don't know whether they count commentaries,
> >>>> book reviews, assuming they don't:) 21
> >>>> D=B/C=0.52
> >>>>
> >>>> In Education, this would put us at a rank of about 49 out of 100
> >>>> journals; in Ed Psych on 27 out of 40, in Social Sciences
> >>>> Interdisciplinary at rank 31 of 48. I also believe that the
> >>>> citations
> >>>> have to come from other journals, at least, this is what a quick
> >>>> check in another journal appeared to indicate (J LEARN SCI,
> >>>> which is
> >>>> #1 in Education, #2 in PSYCH ED).
> >>>>
> >>>> So what you can do is publish in ISI journals, and when you do,
> >>>> cite
> >>>> works in our journal MCA.
> >>>>
> >>>> Cheers,
> >>>> Michael
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> xmca mailing list
> >>> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> >>> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
> >>
> >> David Preiss, Ph.D.
> >> Subdirector de Extensión y Comunicaciones
> >> Escuela de Psicología
> >> Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile
> >> Av Vicuña Mackenna 4860
> >> Macul, Santiago
> >> Chile
> >>
> >> Fono: 3544605
> >> Fax: 3544844
> >> e-mail: davidpreiss@uc.cl
> >> web personal: http://web.mac.com/ddpreiss/
> >> web institucional: http://www.epuc.cl/profesores/dpreiss
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> xmca mailing list
> >> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> >> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > xmca mailing list
> > xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> > http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > xmca mailing list
> > xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> > http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>
> David Preiss, Ph.D.
> Subdirector de Extensión y Comunicaciones
> Escuela de Psicología
> Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile
> Av Vicuña Mackenna 4860
> Macul, Santiago
> Chile
>
> Fono: 3544605
> Fax: 3544844
> e-mail: davidpreiss@uc.cl
> web personal: http://web.mac.com/ddpreiss/
> web institucional: http://www.epuc.cl/profesores/dpreiss
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>

-- 
"Pax Te Cum"
6 Andover Road
Westdene
2092 Johannesburg
011 673 9265  082 562 1050
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca