Books: Measuring Research: What Everyone Needs to Know: Anyone For Donuts?

摘要

Cassidy R Sugimoto and Vincent Lariviére Oxford University Press USA, 2018, PB , 160 pp, ￡ 10.99, 978-0190640125Every summer, journal editors and publishers anxiously await the publication of the Journal Impact Factors, hoping that their journal’s IF will have gone up and that their competitors’ will have gone down. This used to be the only game in town but, in our heart of hearts, we know that Impact Factors are merely one, unsatisfactory, measure of the impact that publications in the biomedical sciences have on practice, policy, and society, and that better metrics are needed. An IF of 3, for example, means that on average each of the peer-reviewed research articles published in a journal has been cited in the mainstream, peer-reviewed literature three times during a specified 2-year window. At the same …