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Science deserves to be judged by its contents, not by its wrapping: Revisiting Seglen's work on journal impact and research evaluation

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  • Lin Zhang
  • Ronald Rousseau
  • Gunnar Sivertsen

Abstract

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.

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  • Lin Zhang & Ronald Rousseau & Gunnar Sivertsen, 2017. "Science deserves to be judged by its contents, not by its wrapping: Revisiting Seglen's work on journal impact and research evaluation," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(3), pages 1-18, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0174205
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0174205
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Per O. Seglen, 1994. "Causal relationship between article citedness and journal impact," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 45(1), pages 1-11, January.
    2. Per O. Seglen, 1992. "The skewness of science," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 43(9), pages 628-638, October.
    3. Waltman, Ludo, 2016. "A review of the literature on citation impact indicators," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(2), pages 365-391.
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    Cited by:

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    4. Guo, Xiaolong & Li, Xiaoxiao & Yu, Yugang, 2021. "Publication delay adjusted impact factor: The effect of publication delay of articles on journal impact factor," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(1).
    5. Giovanni Abramo & Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo & Flavia Costa, 2023. "Correlating article citedness and journal impact: an empirical investigation by field on a large-scale dataset," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(3), pages 1877-1894, March.
    6. Emanuel Kulczycki & Ying Huang & Alesia A. Zuccala & Tim C. E. Engels & Antonio Ferrara & Raf Guns & Janne Pölönen & Gunnar Sivertsen & Zehra Taşkın & Lin Zhang, 2022. "Uses of the Journal Impact Factor in national journal rankings in China and Europe," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 73(12), pages 1741-1754, December.
    7. Brito, Ricardo & Rodríguez-Navarro, Alonso, 2019. "Evaluating research and researchers by the journal impact factor: Is it better than coin flipping?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 13(1), pages 314-324.
    8. Tobias Kiesslich & Marlena Beyreis & Georg Zimmermann & Andreas Traweger, 2021. "Citation inequality and the Journal Impact Factor: median, mean, (does it) matter?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(2), pages 1249-1269, February.
    9. Sandra Rousseau & Ronald Rousseau, 2021. "Bibliometric Techniques And Their Use In Business And Economics Research," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(5), pages 1428-1451, December.

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