Thursday, November 18, 2010

Impact Factors

Frances Woolley makes a great point in Impact Factors and how they vary by field and by sub-field. This issue comes up in medical research all of the time. If I try and be really methodological, a statistics or epidemiology journal has a much smaller imapct factor than a medical journal. On the other hand, if I focus on the drugs and go to a pharmacy journal then impact factors are even lower.

So it is a constant dilemma about how to focus one's research. I would like to think that tenure and promotion committees are sophisticated about such issues but one does worry . . .

I suspect that the same issues are replicated with grant funding.

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