[Taxacom] Open review as a wiki

Frederick W Schueler bckcdb at istar.ca
Thu Apr 3 17:44:09 CDT 2008


Neal Evenhuis wrote:
> At 1:15 AM -1000 4/3/08, Richard Pyle wrote:
> 
> If this is intended to help increase the Impact Factor for taxonomy, 
> it is a futile exercise since the current IF algorithm only takes 
> into account citations of papers published in the last two years (as 
> has been pointed out previously on this list) and taxonomy regularly 
> deals with taxa published decades and centuries old. Thus, giving the 
> literature citation for every taxon cited in a paper will only be 
> useful in increasing the IF (however slightly) if the original 
> descriptions of those organisms were a couple of years old.

* I must say that this IF busieness gets weirder and weirder. It seems 
that somebody needs to formulate a SIF (Sustained Impact Factor), which 
kicks in only when the article is more than 10 years old, and then 
increases with age.

Surely a journal that publishes articles that are still being cited 40 
years later is more important than one that just kicks up a couple of 
years of "Yeti and Zander are completely incorrect when they state..." 
notices.

fred.
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