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Record W2135196769 · doi:10.1177/0883073808315170

Worshiping False Idols: The Impact Factor Dilemma

2008· editorial· en· W2135196769 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Roger A. Brumback

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Child Neurology · 2008
Typeeditorial
Languageen
FieldDecision Sciences
Topicscientometrics and bibliometrics research
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsDynamiteCitationDilemmaQuarter (Canadian coin)Citation indexEconomic shortageScience Citation IndexAlchemyExplosive materialHistoryLawArt historyPolitical sciencePhilosophyArchaeologyEpistemology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

It always begins innocently enough! In the middle of the 19th century, mining and earthmoving were increasingly important enterprises of the industrial revolution. To remove rock and to open mine shafts, an explosive was needed, but nitroglycerine was too unstable for practical use. The Swedish scientist/inventor Alfred Nobel discovered that mixing nitroglycerine with the diatomaceous earth kieselguhr produced a stable explosive product he patented as dynamite, which was quickly adopted by the mining and construction industries. In the early 20th century, the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, while attempting to understand the structure of atomic nuclei, discovered that nuclei bombarded by neutrons would split and release large amounts of energy. As others have employed these discoveries, both dynamite and nuclear fission have had destructive effects on society that were initially unimaginable by their discoverers. It was only a quarter century after the first nuclear fission bombs that Eugene Garfield, a library scientist and structural linguist from the University of Pennsylvania, discovered a metric that could be used to select journals for inclusion in his new publication Genetics Citation Index (the forerunner of Science Citation Index, which was subsequently commercialized by Garfield’s company Institute for Scientific Information). This metric for journals was named “impact factor” and was to be calculated “based on 2 elements: the numerator, which is the number of citations in the current year to any items published in a journal in the previous 2 years, and the denominator, which is the number of substantive articles (source items) published in the same 2 years.” 1,2 Thus, although the journal impact factor was born innocently enough, just like the examples involving Nobel and Fermi, Garfield’s impact factor is now being used by others in ways that threaten to destroy scientific inquiry as we know it. 3,4 For much of human history (about 200,000 generations), scientists were few in number, often worked in relative isolation, and only communicated findings to close

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.020
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.191
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Bibliometrics, Scholarly communication, Open science, Research integrity
Consensus categoriesBibliometrics
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Editorial · Consensus signal: Editorial
Teacher disagreement score0.171
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0200.191
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0520.060
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0020.001
Open science0.0080.001
Research integrity0.0010.006
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.441
GPT teacher head0.559
Teacher spread0.118 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEditorial

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations63
Published2008
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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