Citation Statistics; report from IMU of imapct factors and citation ranking

International Mathematical Union announces Citation Statistics report
Numbers with a number of problems

http://www.mathunion.org/Publications/Report/CitationStatistics

Wednesday, 11 June 2008

The International Mathematical Union today released the Citation Statistics report. Citation-based statistics, such as the impact factor, are often used to assess scientific research, but are they the best measures of research quality? Three international mathematics organizations have today released a report, Citation Statistics, on the use of citations in assessing research quality – a topic that is of increasing interest throughout the world's scientific community.

The report is written from a mathematical perspective and strongly cautions against the over-reliance on citation statistics such as the impact factor and h-index. These are often promoted because of the belief in their accuracy, objectivity, and simplicity, but these beliefs are unfounded.

Among the report’s key findings:

• Statistics are not more accurate when they are improperly used; statistics can mislead when they are misused or misunderstood.
• The objectivity of citations is illusory because the meaning of citations is not well-understood. A citation's meaning can be very far from "impact".
• While having a single number to judge quality is indeed simple, it can lead to a shallow under-standing of something as complicated as research. Numbers are not inherently superior to sound judgments.
  

The report promotes the sensible use of citation statistics in evaluating research and points out several common misuses. It is written by mathematical scientists about a widespread application of mathematics. While the authors of the report recognize that assessment must be practical and that easily- derived citation statistics will be part of the process, they caution that citations provide only a limited and incomplete view of research quality.

Research is too important, they say, to measure its value with only a single coarse tool.

The report was commissioned by the International Mathematical Union (IMU) in cooperation with the International Council on Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM), and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS). It draws upon a broad literature on the use of citation data to evaluate research, including articles on the impact factor (the most common citation-
based statistic) and the h-index along with its many variants. The work was also based on practices as reported from mathematicians and other scientists from around the world.

IMU, ICIAM, IMS
About the International Mathematical Union (IMU): IMU is an international non-governmental and non-profit scientific organization, with the purpose of promoting international cooperation in mathematics. More information at http://www.mathunion.org/.

Contact: Martin Groetschel, Secretary of the International Mathematical Union
Zuse Institute Berlin, Takustr. 7 D-14195 Berlin, Germany
e-mail: secretary@mathunion.org, phone: +49 30 84185 210

To Share or Not To Share: Publication and Quality Assurance of Research Data Results

Recently released report from UK Research Information Network (RIN) http://www.rin.ac.uk/data-publication has a summary as well as links to the full report. The report is based upon analysis on 100+ in-depth interviews.

Couple of suggestive results to us are:

1. a number of factors (e.g. lack of explicit career rewards, a wish to retain exclusive use of the data until their publication value has been exhausted, a lack of time, resources, expertise, or an appropriate archive service) constrain the publishing of research data; and
   
2. there is need for evaluating quality of research data and making them more searchable accessible, and usable.

UC Irvine 10 Things winner!

After ten months since the program was announced I was awarded the "First Finisher" of the UC Irvine 10 Things Library event. Wow! I finished the ten Web 2.0 tasks before Thanksgiving 2007 so we can get to the main issue - using these tools in a practical sense. Let us move forward, please ...

Microsoft Pulls Plug on Live Search Books

Microsoft Pulls Plug on Live Search Books
By Jim Milliot -- Publishers Weekly, 5/23/2008 8:53:00 AM
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6563730.html?nid=2286&source=title&rid=

In an early morning post, Microsoft announced that it is ending Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects and taking down both sites. Through the programs, Microsoft has digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles. Those results will now be integrated into general search results. Effective immediately, Microsoft has stopped digitizing new materials in both its library scanning and in-copyright book programs.

According to Microsoft, "based on our experience, we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries."

Microsoft will be providing publishers with digital copies of their scanned books, and is working with Ingram Digital, which was doing much of the scanning, to provide publishers with sales and marketing opportunities for titles already in Live Search Books.

From Publisher's Weekly -- see also the blog post - http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/05/23/book-search-winding-down.aspx

Microsoft Announcement
http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/05/23/book-search-winding-down.aspx

New York Times
Friday news brief: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/technology/24soft.html?ex=1369281600&en=04f58de95a70d498&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
Fuller article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/technology/24soft.html?ex=1369368000&en=afece5de206c92e4&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Internet Archive Statement
http://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id=194217

PLoS Biology article on teaching evolution and creationism in high-school biology classes

Evolution and Creationism in America's Classrooms: A National Portrait

Michael B. Berkman^*, Julianna Sandell Pacheco, Eric Plutzer

Citation: Berkman MB, Pacheco JS, Plutzer E (2008) Evolution and Creationism in America's Classrooms: A National Portrait. PLoS Biol 6(5): e124 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060124

Published: May 20, 2008

Copyright: © 2008 Berkman et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abbreviations: ID, intelligent design; NSES, National Science Education Standards

Michael B. Berkman is Professor of Political Science, Julianna Sandell Pacheco is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science, and Eric Plutzer is Professor of Political Science and Academic Director of the Penn State Survey Research Center in the Department of Political Science, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States of America.

Create an avatar Mii for Wii

Create your own unique avatar (called a "Mii" for the Wii) online at: http://nosheep.net/story/create-your-mii/.

ARL Scholarly Communication Discussion Guides Updated and Expanded

ARL Scholarly Communication Discussion Guides Updated and Expanded

Washington DC--The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Office of Scholarly Communication has enhanced its popular series of free discussion guides on current scholarly communication issues to facilitate summer discussion programs among library staff.

As the scholarly communication system continues to change rapidly, the Library Brown-Bag Lunch Series on Issues in Scholarly Communication is a valuable resource for library staff to use in expanding their own awareness of key issues and preparing for campus outreach. The series now offers eight guides and a discussion leader's introduction. Entirely new discussion guides on new model publications and author rights have been created. The series now includes both an introductory guide for discussions of author rights and a second guide for discussions of institutional policies on author rights. Several others of the original guides have been revised to reflect advancements occurring in the past year and new suggestions for further reading have been added.

ARL's discussion series was developed by Karla Hahn, Director of the Office of Scholarly Communication, and covers:

• Starting discussions of scholarly communication
• Talking with faculty
• Access to publicly funded research
• Author rights
• Institutional strategies for rights management
• Scholarly society roles
• Peer review
• New model publications

Each guide offers prework and discussion questions for a meeting, along with resources that provide further background for the discussion leader of an hour-long session. The guides can serve as a starting point for a single discussion or for a series of conversations.

Using the discussion guides, library leaders can launch a program quickly without requiring special expertise on the topics. A brown-bag series could be initiated by a library director, a group of staff, or by any staff person with an interest in the scholarly communication system. The only requirements are the willingness to organize the gatherings and facilitate each meeting's discussion.

Electronic copies of the guides are freely available at http://www.arl.org/sc/brownbag/.