At the moment, all you have is Impact Factor to go by. Over time other metrics will become widely accepted and publicised - for example, numbers of downloads.
Charles
________________________________________
From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG] On Behalf Of Jakes Rawlinson [brajakes_at_GMAIL.COM]
Sent: 17 May 2010 09:35
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Open Access and 'Metrics'
Thanks all, I've learned an amazing amount being fairly new to OA, as news travels fairly slowly in the 'South'....
Mentioning metrics and especially the google phenomenon with everybody 'googling', the more something comes in the top 20 in Google, the more it will be used - most are satisfied with the information and don't go any furher...... So there will definitely some bias introduced along the way.
I know that Stevan for one has done a lot of work on metrics and thus a want to throw a question in here that was asked to me by a Dr Wand De - Editor of the Chinese Medical Journal: "Which are the top 10 (biomedical) OA journals?"
I've been to the Open Citation Project site and other sites and realise that it is quite a complex issue - to put it mildly! The commercial biomedical journals still use the 'impact factor' and then you have a convenient list of 1 to X........
Can anybody help me with answering this question?
Thanks,
Jakes
On 16 May 2010 13:05, Stevan Harnad <amsciforum_at_gmail.com<mailto:amsciforum_at_gmail.com>> wrote:
David Goodman was a valuable early voice in this Forum, and he is now
one of the rare Wikipedia volunteers with academic expertise.
David is right that OA and Wikipedia are different and not mutually
exclusive, but he does not address the point I was making, which is
that "whatever limited reliability and accuracy it has," Wikipedia
comes up invariably as the first hit for google users globally.........
Now I too consult Wikipedia now and again. (How can I fail to do it,
since I consult google, and google keeps thrusting the Wikipedia entry
on my search term, if there is one, to the top of my hit list
[probably accurately, according to google's PageRank metric]?)
Stevan Harnad
Received on Mon May 17 2010 - 19:39:47 BST