Impact Factor: outdated artefact or stepping-stone to journal certification?

A review of Garfield's journal impact factor and its specific implementation as the Thomson Reuters Impact Factor reveals several weaknesses in this commonly-used indicator of journal standing. Key limitations include the mismatch between citing and cited documents, the deceptive display of three decimals that belies the real precision, and the absence of confidence intervals. These are minor issues that are easily amended and should be corrected, but more substantive improvements are needed. There are indications that the scientific community seeks and needs better certification of journal procedures to improve the quality of published science. Comprehensive certification of editorial and review procedures could help ensure adequate procedures to detect duplicate and fraudulent submissions.Comment: 25 pages, 12 figures, 6 table

The role of public funding in nanotechnology scientific production: Where Canada stands in comparison to the United States

This paper presents cross-country comparisons between Canada and the United States in terms of the impact of public grants and scientific collaborations on subsequent nanotechnology-related publications. In this study we present the varying involvement of academic researchers and government funding to capture the influence of funded research in order to help government agencies evaluate their efficiency in financing nanotechnology research. We analyze the measures of quantity and quality of research output using time-related econometric models and compare the results between nanotechnology scientists in Canada and the United States. The results reveal that both research grants and the position of researchers in co-publication networks have a positive influence on scientific output. Our findings demonstrate that research funding yields a significantly positive linear impact in Canada and a positive non-linear impact in the United States on the number of papers and in terms of the number of citations we observe a positive impact only in the US. Our research shows that the position of scientists in past scientific networks plays an important role in the quantity and quality of papers published by nanotechnology scientists

Impact of Article Language in Multi-Language Medical Journals - a Bibliometric Analysis of Self-Citations and Impact Factor

BACKGROUND: In times of globalization there is an increasing use of English in the medical literature. The aim of this study was to analyze the influence of English-language articles in multi-language medical journals on their international recognition – as measured by a lower rate of self-citations and higher impact factor (IF). METHODS AND FINDINGS: We analyzed publications in multi-language journals in 2008 and 2009 using the Web of Science (WoS) of Thomson Reuters (former Institute of Scientific Information) and PubMed as sources of information. The proportion of English-language articles during the period was compared with both the share of self-citations in the year 2010 and the IF with and without self-citations. Multivariable linear regression analysis was performed to analyze these factors as well as the influence of the journals‘ countries of origin and of the other language(s) used in publications besides English. We identified 168 multi-language journals that were listed in WoS as well as in PubMed and met our criteria. We found a significant positive correlation of the share of English articles in 2008 and 2009 with the IF calculated without self-citations (Pearson r=0.56, p = <0.0001), a correlation with the overall IF (Pearson r = 0.47, p = <0.0001) and with the cites to years of IF calculation (Pearson r = 0.34, p = <0.0001), and a weak negative correlation with the share of self-citations (Pearson r = -0.2, p = 0.009). The IF without self-citations also correlated with the journal‘s country of origin – North American journals had a higher IF compared to Middle and South American or European journals. CONCLUSION: Our findings suggest that a larger share of English articles in multi-language medical journals is associated with greater international recognition. Fewer self-citations were found in multi-language journals with a greater share of original articles in English