The "impact factor" revisited Export

@article{citeulike:3207960, abstract = {The number of scientific journals has become so large that individuals, institutions and institutional libraries cannot completely store their content physically, and much less so intellectually. In order to prioritize the choice of quality information sources, librarians and scientists are in need of reliable decision aids. The "impact factor" is the most commonly used assessment aid in the decision-making process of which journals to contribute to, or to retrieve knowledge from. It is also an often misunderstood tool. This narrative review explains how the impact factor is calculated, how bias is introduced into the calculation, which questions it can or cannot answer, and how different professional groups can benefit from the information that the impact factor provides.}, author = {Dong, Peng and Loh, Marie and Mondry, Adrian}, citeulike-article-id = {3207960}, citeulike-linkout-0 = {http://dx.doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1742-5581-2-7}, citeulike-linkout-1 = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1742-5581-2-7}, doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1742-5581-2-7}, journal = {Biomedical Digital Libraries}, keywords = {\_unfiled, ir-ranking, links, science}, month = {December}, number = {1}, pages = {7+}, posted-at = {2008-09-09 06:40:37}, priority = {2}, title = {The "impact factor" revisited}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1742-5581-2-7}, volume = {2}, year = {2005} }

TY - JOUR ID - citeulike:3207960 L3 - citeulike-article-id:3207960 N2 - The number of scientific journals has become so large that individuals, institutions and institutional libraries cannot completely store their content physically, and much less so intellectually. In order to prioritize the choice of quality information sources, librarians and scientists are in need of reliable decision aids. The "impact factor" is the most commonly used assessment aid in the decision-making process of which journals to contribute to, or to retrieve knowledge from. It is also an often misunderstood tool. This narrative review explains how the impact factor is calculated, how bias is introduced into the calculation, which questions it can or cannot answer, and how different professional groups can benefit from the information that the impact factor provides. IS - 1 JF - Biomedical Digital Libraries TI - The "impact factor" revisited VL - 2 SP - 7 KW - _unfiled KW - ir-ranking KW - links KW - science AU - Dong, Peng AU - Loh, Marie AU - Mondry, Adrian PY - 2005/December// UR - http://dx.doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1742-5581-2-7 ER -