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A comment on The Research Pirates of the Dark Web. Parent comment

Re:The Research Pirates of the Dark Web by friendzis on Wednesday February 10, 2016 @08:44AM (#11072628)
To put it short: Academic "weight" works much like google - the more citations paper has, the higher it is ranked. Of course a citation from local university journal (probably every university has at least one) is worth much, much less than a citation from Nature. It is calculated from Impact Factor, that is in turn calculated from number of citations. Sort of a closed loop.

This would not be too much of a problem if not for funding. You see, funding, that is necessary for anything non-trivial, is usually awarded according to researcher's reputation - something again based on impact, citations, etc.

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Re:The Research Pirates of the Dark Web by sevensor on Wednesday February 10, 2016 @02:31PM (#11075321)
It might even be more accurate to say that google works like academic "weight" -- it's my understanding that PageRank was originally intended to rank research papers.
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Re:The Research Pirates of the Dark Web by auvrw on Thursday February 11, 2016 @03:48AM (#11079011)
yep, "Impact Factor" (IF) is the term, and (just to clarify) it encourages but does not force. there are open access journals like PLoS w/ significant IF, albeit not comparable to Nature.

since the link below was written, PLoS has become not only open access for articles but also open access for the data those articles are based on. imo, open access to data (w/ privacy measures, of course, for human subjects) is of the same order of importance as access to articles.

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2013/06/20/the-rise-and-f...

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