This article on arXiv discusses several important facts about journal impact factors. This is an interesting issue for psycholinguistics; I have encountered the situation in our field of a person who said he would not cite a paper because it didn't appear in a high impact factor journal. Another, an editor in a high-impact journal (high impact factor in our field means 3 or more ;), once said to me he only reads papers that come out in a specific journal X, because if it didn't appear there, it's not worth reading by definition.
Educating people is hard. If you are too busy to read the article linked below, I can summarize the advice for you: read the paper to decide if it has anything of importance; don't look at the impact factor of the journal to decide whether to read it.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.0278
Of course, it is possible that what holds for applied mathematics has no relevance for psycholinguistics.
Educating people is hard. If you are too busy to read the article linked below, I can summarize the advice for you: read the paper to decide if it has anything of importance; don't look at the impact factor of the journal to decide whether to read it.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.0278
Of course, it is possible that what holds for applied mathematics has no relevance for psycholinguistics.
No comments:
Post a Comment