WSJ in impact factor

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

No doubt many of the members of this list will already have seen 
the article in today's Wall St. Journal on "gaming" the impact 
factor for science journals.  As the WSJ site requires a 
subscription, the link is useless, though presumably many on this 
list have access through institutional subscriptions.  The byline 
is Sharon Begley, the headline is:  Science Journals Artfully Try 
To Boost Their Rankings.  It is dated June 5 and appears on page 
B1 of the hardcopy edition (so the online citation says).

The gist of the article is that some journals are trying to 
increase their citation count in somewhat devious ways, thus 
improving their impact factor as measured by ISI. I doubt any of 
this comes as a surprise to anyone but a journalist, who, like 
FEMA, always get to the action ten years too late.

What should be clear, however, is that impact factors and ISI's 
unofficial role as umpire for the academy are coming under heavy 
challenges and may indeed be bankrupt.  New measurements are 
needed, but of what kind?  I am myself biased toward page views, 
which speak to readership rather than authorship.  One of the 
benefits of using page views is that there is a huge Internet 
industry in the consumer sector that has already built the tools 
for counting and auditing page views.  I am sure there are other 
ideas worth considering.

And, yes, this has important implications.  Page views put an 
emphasis on findability, which means more search engine 
optimization and less hierarchical Web site architectures.  Open 
Access lends itself to findability--indeed, it is OA's principal 
merit.  Page views militate against mediating interfaces, whether 
the portal of a publisher or a library.

Universities "in-source" many things and "out-source" others; the 
logic behind some of these decisions is not always self-evident. 
What is truly odd, however, is the outsourcing of the 
certification process to publishers, whether commercial or 
not-for-profit, leaving ISI to stand behind home plate and call 
the balls and strikes.  Someone who wants to transform scholarly 
communications would start by selecting a new umpire.

Joe Esposito