Re: [xmca] Publish or Perish indices

Depending on university, the count books more, especially those
published by university presses (Harvard, Cambridge, Chicago). Michael
On 5-Nov-07, at 9:00 AM, Carol Macdonald wrote:

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
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>
>>> 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
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>
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>
> 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
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>

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