Deep Impact: Unintended consequences of journal rank
http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.3748
Björn Brembs, Marcus Munafò
Most researchers acknowledge an intrinsic hierarchy in the scholarly
journals ('journal rank') that they submit their work to, and adjust
not only their submission but also their reading strategies
accordingly. On the other hand, much has been written about the
negative effects of institutionalizing journal rank as an impact
measure. So far, contributions to the debate concerning the
limitations of journal rank as a scientific impact assessment tool
have either lacked data, or relied on only a few studies. In this
review, we present the most recent and pertinent data on the
consequences of our current scholarly communication system with
respect to various measures of scientific quality (such as
utility/citations, methodological soundness, expert ratings or
retractions). These data corroborate previous hypotheses: using
journal rank as an assessment tool is bad scientific practice.
Moreover, the data lead us to argue that any journal rank (not only
the currently-favored Impact Factor) would have this negative impact.
Therefore, we suggest that abandoning journals altogether, in favor of
a library-based scholarly communication system, will ultimately be
necessary. This new system will use modern information technology to
vastly improve the filter, sort and discovery functions of the current
journal system.
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