Impacts of the Impact Factor
A purely hypothetical situation: You take part in a competition for a tenure track and make it into the finals. You and the other applicant have equally good profiles, experience and both two are fully capable. But then, the journal articles you have on your list are published in journals that: a) are new, b) have been discontinued, c) their impact factor (IF) is low (because of a) or b) or something else) , d) are not included in a citation index, e) their IF is not available.
The committee will most probably not understand what is the specific area of your research and what is the relevance of each of your publications. So, instead, they will look at the IF of the journals. You lost.
What is the learning? Shall one publish only in the journals that have high IF? Is that a good guide to publish?
Impact factor database can be found at ISI Web of Knowledge, but it does not contain all journals. Estimated impact of some venues in Computer Science is maintained by Citeseer (damn, my favorite PPIG is not there :).
Hi,
That is very pragmatic approach, but I don’t know whether it is the only
truth. Are you sure that you would even want to be tenured, if the process
is relaying on only certain old-fashioned and stilted procedures? I
personally think that the content and ideas are king and you should be
judged according to that, not merely by the medium that you use.
Cf.:
in general: http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i08/08a01201.htm
or more personal: http://www.nodalpoint.org/node/1694
- Pasi
P.s. Says the one, who loves to fight the authorities, but also loves to be
one.. ;)
I have learned one truth: “Do not judge and not be judged”