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发帖数: 20445 | 1 【 以下文字转载自 Biology 讨论区 】
发信人: Guanish (灌泥水), 信区: Biology
标 题: 有学者和团体正式呼吁抛弃“影响因子”了
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Mon May 20 11:15:31 2013, 美东)
NSF、NCI 等也准备修改简历的格式，强调重要的工作、发现和结果之类的。链接：
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2013/05/call-to-aband
Title: In 'Insurrection,' Scientists, Editors Call for Abandoning Journal
Impact Factors
More than 150 prominent scientists and 75 scientific groups from around the
world today took a stand against using impact factors, a measure of how
often a journal is cited, to gauge the quality of an individual's work. They
say researchers should be judged by the content of their papers, not where
the studies are published.
Journal impact factors, calculated by the company Thomson Reuters, were
first developed in the 1950s to help libraries decide which journals to
order. Yet, impact factors are now widely used to assess the performance of
individuals and research institutions. The metric "has become an obsession"
that "warp[s] the way that research is conducted, reported, and funded,"
said a group of scientists organized by the American Society for Cell
Biology (ASCB) in a press release. Particularly in China and India, they say
, postdocs think that they should try to publish their work in only journals
with high impact factors.
The problem, the scientists say, is that the impact factor is flawed. For
example, it doesn't distinguish primary research from reviews; it can be
skewed by a few highly cited papers; and it dissuades journals from
publishing papers in fields such as ecology that are cited less often than,
say, biomedical studies.
In what they've dubbed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment
(DORA)—a document drafted last December at the annual ASCB meeting and
posted online today—the scientists write: "It is … imperative that
scientific output is measured accurately and evaluated wisely." Their 18
recommendations urge the research community to "eliminate" the use of
journal impact factors in funding, hiring, and promotion decisions.
Signatories include Science Editor-in-Chief Bruce Alberts (see his editorial
); AAAS, Science's publisher; dozens of other editors, journals, and
societies; as well as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Wellcome
Trust, which are major research charities.
"I see this as an insurrection. We don't want to be at the mercy of this
anymore," says ASCB Executive Director Stefano Bertuzzi. He adds that the
scientists aren't criticizing Thomson Reuters. "We're not attacking them in
any way," he says. Instead, the resolution puts the blame on the research
community for "the misuse of impact factors."
Bertuzzi says that his group realizes they won't change things overnight: "I
see this as the beginning of a conversation." Still, he says, there are
already signs of change.
For example, National Cancer Institute Director Harold Varmus is planning a
pilot test that will ask researchers submitting biosketches with their grant
proposals to describe their most important work instead of simply listing
their key papers. Varmus said recently that he wants researchers to stop
thinking that they must publish in only "certain hyper-prestigious journals.
" (In a similar move, the National Science Foundation recently changed its
biosketch guidelines to emphasize "products" such as data sets, not just
papers.)
Thomson Reuters did not respond to a request for comment.
*Update, 11:05 a.m., 17 May:
Thomson Reuters responded to the DORA in this statement, agreeing that: "No
one metric can fully capture the complex contributions scholars make to
their disciplines, and many forms of scholarly achievement should be
considered." The company notes that the impact factor "is singled-out in the
Declaration not for how it is calculated, but for how it is used." |
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