BIOL 210 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Geometric Distribution, Quartile, Impact Factor
09/28/2017
Lecture 8
• Ingelfinger rule
o Peer review and journal publication must precede media announcement
o Media embargo: protects prestige of journal and scientific publications
▪ You can’t go public before publication
o Original research can only be published once
▪ You can also only submit to 1 journal at a time
o New trend: pre-publication archives: ArXiv, with moderators and endorsement
instead of formal peer reviews
▪ Subtle grey zone between ingelfinger rule and publishing
o Ingelfinger was an editor at NEJM
o Applies even to scientific conferences: you can’t share new research before it’s
published in journals
o If you break this rule, journals won’t publish you
• Embargo watch: similar to retraction watch, they are against the embargo
• Pons & Fleischmann (2 obscure chemists)
o The experiment: cold fusion, makes energy from hydrogen
▪ Heavy water + electrolyte with a palladium cathode in it, it had been
receiving heat, neutrons, and traces of tritium
o Failures to replicate
▪ This experiment should kill you if it does what it says it does
▪ MIT and caltech couldnt, georgia tech could
o Violation of the Ingelfinger rule
▪ Gave a press conference before publishing in journal
▪ Errors in experiment couldn’t be checked by peer reviewers→ they ended
up humiliated because of their failed experiment
o Chemists in physics
o Incompetence or fraud?
▪ Incompetence
▪ If they had waited for peer review the paper would’ve been rejected and
they wouldn’t have been humiliated, the mistake would’ve been caught
• Primacy: first discovery is important
• The journal impact factor
o Average number of times articles from the journal published in the past 2 years
have been cited in the JCR year
o Impact factor: the average number of times a paper from a given journal is cited
per year, taking into account a time window of the past 2 years
o If of a journal for 2017 is the number of times papers published in that journal in
2015 or 2016 are cited in the entire literature covered by the WoS in 2017,
divided by the number of papers published in that journal in 2015 and 2016
• Eigenfactor score: based on the number of times articles from the journal published in the
past 5 years have been cited in the JCR year, but it also considers which journals have
contributed these citations so that highly cited journals will influence the network more
than lesser cited journals
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Ingelfinger was an editor at nejm: applies even to scientific conferences: you can"t share new research before it"s published in journals. Impact factor: the average number of times a paper from a given journal is cited per year, taking into account a time window of the past 2 years. If of a journal for 2017 is the number of times papers published in that journal in. Impact factor makes no sense because most scientific papers are cited very seldom (once), a few in each journal become stars, makes no sense to take a mean if 1 journal has. In some disciplines, older papers are not cited after a while: the cited half-life of journals in these disciplines is short, the proportion of recent papers (i. e. past 5 years) in bibliographies in these disciplines will be high. If you have a high impact factor, you"re likely to have high everything else but low citing half life.
