German universities take on Dutch publishing giant Elsevier

Re:German universities take on Dutch publishing giant Elsevier by stult on Monday August 14, 2017 @08:48AM (#15008229)

Well, that exists in the form of citations. The more a paper is cited the more valued are its authors. Just as the more often a site is linked to, the higher its page rank. And since you're not dealing with massive numbers of sites with lots of SEO experts, straight citation count is good enough without any of the corrections included in the page rank algorithm.

Hiring committees look at both quantity of publications and citations to those publications. The problem is that quantity doesn't always indicate quality. Which is why journal prestige acts as a proxy measure.

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Re:German universities take on Dutch publishing giant Elsevier by rocqua on Monday August 14, 2017 @10:43AM (#15008897)

I always though this was the impact factor of a journal. However, according to [1] that is not the case. [2] Mentions the 'eigenfactor' which seems to be closer to emulating page-rank. I haven't read much about it though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor [2] http://researchguides.uic.edu/if/impact

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Re:German universities take on Dutch publishing giant Elsevier by amelius on Monday August 14, 2017 @09:01AM (#15008281)

> Well, that exists in the form of citations.

Page-rank is "transitive" in the sense that it not only counts citations, but also citations-of-citations, etc.

I wonder though if such a system can be easily gamed (see SEO), without damaging the reputation of offending authors.

Also, we should perhaps have the concept of "negative citations". For example, when the text contains "In this paper we show that the approach of [..] is incorrect."

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