tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13869903.post2933255852604460009..comments2024-03-28T04:15:44.459-05:00Comments on nanoscale views: Impact factors and academic "moneyball"Douglas Natelsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13340091255404229559noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13869903.post-28725231171481615182016-07-27T13:26:24.982-05:002016-07-27T13:26:24.982-05:00Anon@8:03, thanks! That was very interesting read...Anon@8:03, thanks! That was very interesting reading.Douglas Natelsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13340091255404229559noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13869903.post-75574693851622380862016-07-27T08:03:01.924-05:002016-07-27T08:03:01.924-05:00https://responsiblemetrics.org/the-metric-tide/
P...https://responsiblemetrics.org/the-metric-tide/<br /><br />Please scroll down this web site and there is huge report " The metrics tide" .Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13869903.post-61211914379368563352016-07-25T10:34:30.736-05:002016-07-25T10:34:30.736-05:00When metrics are so uncritically and widely sought...When metrics are so uncritically and widely sought and used to evaluate humans, certain part of humanity is obviously lost …<br /><br />Humans are on the brink of deteriorating into modern barbarians.<br /><br /> Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13869903.post-43268729642650975872016-07-21T11:04:43.037-05:002016-07-21T11:04:43.037-05:00Anon, you're right, of course. I agree, both ...Anon, you're right, of course. I agree, both about why IF was designed as it was, the role of high-level (that is, representing complex multivariate properties with a single number) metrics, and the tendency to preserve hierarchies. (Sorry about the caption typo. That was one of those cases where my brain was thinking "median would be much more representative" and thus I typed "median" when the whole point is that "mean" = impact factor = a bad way to describe the information in that distribution.) Douglas Natelsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13340091255404229559noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13869903.post-38092139204584988212016-07-20T23:56:50.245-05:002016-07-20T23:56:50.245-05:00Doug, the Nature article spends a lot of ink (or p...Doug, the Nature article spends a lot of ink (or pixels) explaining what statisticians and economists know all too well: means or "averages" are meaningless in skewed distributions, and medians are the correct statistic (please correct the typo in your caption).<br /><br />I suspect the reason why the impact factor got defined the way it did, is that a metric that uses median citation numbers would probably not differentiate much between many journals; most journals probably have a median article citation number smaller than 5. And this alone makes the point that this impact factor is a very coarse metric.<br /><br />We live in a world where decision-makers rely on high-level metrics to make their decisions, or at least to confirm a decision they have already made in the old-fashioned way (like in academic hiring). Impact factors are just one more example of that mindset, and are probably not going to go away so easily. And whatever new metric replaces it, Nature editors will make sure that they still keep their top ranking.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com