Open AccessScience deserves to be judged by its contents, not by its wrapping: Revisiting Seglen's work on journal impact and research evaluation
Author(s) -
Lin Zhang,
Ronald Rousseau,
Gunnar Sivertsen
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0174205
Subject(s) - manifesto , impact factor , work (physics) , declaration , criticism , foundation (evidence) , metric (unit) , engineering ethics , library science , computer science , political science , engineering , law , mechanical engineering , operations management
The scientific foundation for the criticism on the use of the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) in evaluations of individual researchers and their publications was laid between 1989 and 1997 in a series of articles by Per O. Seglen. His basic work has since influenced initiatives such as the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), the Leiden Manifesto for research metrics, and The Metric Tide review on the role of metrics in research assessment and management. Seglen studied the publications of only 16 senior biomedical scientists. We investigate whether Seglen’s main findings still hold when using the same methods for a much larger group of Norwegian biomedical scientists with more than 18,000 publications. Our results support and add new insights to Seglen’s basic work.