Dear diary,

I’m attending a course about scientific publishing, and the other day there was lecture about bibliometrics by Lovisa Österlund and David Lawrence from the Linköping University library. I don’t think I know anyone who particularly likes bibliometrics, but I guess it makes sense that if one needs to evaluate research without trying to understand what it is about there are only citations, the reputation of the publication channel and the cv of the researcher to look at. I imagine it’s a bit like reviewing a novel in a language one doesn’t know. A couple of things occured to me, though.

What to do when different instruments of evaluation give different results? Take the two papers (so far) published during my PhD: they both deal with the genetics of chicken comb size; one is published in PLOS Genetics and one in Molecular Ecology. If we look at journal impact factors (and we shouldn’t, but say that we do), PLOS Genetics comes out ahead with an impact factor of 8.5 against 6.3. For those that do not know this about it, journal impact factor is the mean number of citations for papers in that journal the last two years calculated by Thomson Reuters in their own secret way. However, Linköping University has for some reason decided to use the Norwegian index for evaluating publication channels. I don’t know why, and I don’t think it matters that much for me personally, since the system will change soon and I will finish in about a year and a half. In the Norwegian system journals are ranked as level one or two, where two is better and is supposed to represent the top 20% of that subject area. According to their database, Molecular ecology is level 2, while PLOS Genetics is level 1. The source of the discrepancy is probably that PLOS Genetics is counted as biomedicine, while Molecular Ecology is biology, according to the Norwegian database.

They also mentioned Altmetrics, and I don’t know what to make of it. On one hand, I guess it’s good to keep tabs on social media. On the other hand, what do numbers of tweets really tell you, except that one of the authors has a Twitter account? One of the examples in the lecture was the metrics page for this paper that I happen to be a contributor to. It is actually pretty strange. It shows three tweets or 11 tweets, depending on where on the page you look. Also, when I accessed this page earlier today it linked a blog. Now it doesn’t. That says something about the ephemeral nature of internet media. Regardless, when I first saw the page I thought perhaps the metrics page had picked up on my post about the paper, but that was not the case. I don’t know how altmetric.com define a ”science blog”, maybe the blog has to be listed on some aggregation site or another, and I’m not pretending my post is particularly insightful or important. Still it’s a little strange that the altmetrics page doesn’t list a post by one of the authors about the paper, but listed a post that referred to the paper with only two sentences and was mistaken about the conclusion.