This article from the PLoS blog recaptured my attention on the ever-fascinating metric … the impact factor. PLoS is ardently proposing individual article metrics to better measure the impact factor of a paper. PLoS has even removed all 2008 Thomson ISI impact factors from the front page of all their journal websites.
I know many alternatives to the impact factor have been proposed. Here is a thought, why not just post the impact factor of a paper by itself? I think this is interesting considering that according to Philip Campbell, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Nature, the journal’s 2004 impact factor broke down like this: 89% of the impact factor was generated by 25% of the papers. (http://tr.im/wIqn) Campbell goes on to state that the “majority of our papers received fewer than 20 citations.”
What a skew!
My colleagues and I have even joked about assigning each scientist their own impact factor. Now we’re getting individual!
