Kamil S. Jaron

Kamil S. Jaron

genome naturalist;

Flawed justification of journal impact factor

2 minute read

Published:

About a year and half ago an article by John Tregoning was published in Nature News. The short piece was openly defending the prevalent usage of journal impact factor for evaluation of junior scientists for their sake. As a junior scientist I felt bitter. The publishing system is a huge academic problem we should do something about it! And as far as I know, young scientists are the loudest in pointing out new ways for less morally corrupted sharing of knowledge and therefore I find unfair a senior academic takes us, as an argument for keeping the status quo.

I submitted a response about two months after the original publication, but the editorial office did not wanted to publish it because I was “too late”. I forgot about it for a while, but now I see that the original piece is actually cited, and I feel obligation at least post the response here:

No junior scientist likes impact factor

In his essay How will you judge me if not by impact factor, John Tregoning, a Senior Lecturer at Imperial College London, advocates for using the journal impact factor (JIF) to evaluate young scientists, arguing that, even though JIF is far from the ideal, moving target only leads to confusion over the rules of the academic game and to the subsequent sapping of scientific productivity. This view, however, fails to recognize actual opinions of junior scientists. The majority of us, PhD students and postdocs, have started an academic career without any knowledge about academic publishing, simply out of passion for exploring the unknown. It was actually a great shock to find out that research skills do not really matter; if there is anything we are confused about, it is why a journal metric is used to evaluate scientists in the first place.

The vast majority of junior colleagues I have met would prefer not being evaluated by JIF, including those that have published in Nature. At the end of the day, the number of rejected candidates will be the same whether JIF is used or not, the only difference being that disregarding JIF might result in making the process of employing new professors a bit more just. In conclusion, I believe I do understand why JIF is used. It is an easy and well-established metric, perpetuated by the general belief that there is no time to make a better one. But while all these might be valid reasons to keep it, our wellbeing does not belong to them.

Leave a Comment

You May Also Enjoy

PCI made Google doc temlpates

3 minute read

Published:

Have you heard about PeerCommunityIn, or PCI for short? It’s an organisation, that runs a peer reviewing platform and a diamond-open access journal. The way it works is, you submit a preprit to any of the preprint servers (such as bioRxiv) and then pass the details to appropriate PCI (there are 15 are moment for all sorts of disciplines). There will be a recommender (moreless like an editor), who will manage your preprint, evaluate if it is a credible piece and then send invitations to reviewers. Once you get through the review process, your priperint will get recommended. Once that happens, it’s up to you what you do next, you can either submit the already reviewed preprint to one of the classical journals, or you can right away publish it in the PCI Journal. The initiative is great for reducing work load for reviewers, bringing transparency to the review process and finally brings a sustainable solution to scientific publishing - you should totally check it out.

Testing FastK on a difficult genome

11 minute read

Published:

Once per while there is a new way how to do things and speed up computations in the world of kmer genomics. Sometimes the tricks are simply more efficient algorithms, but sometimes the tricks are shortcuts that don’t do excatly the same thing. Here I would like to dig a bit in the relatively new k-mer counter FastK and compare it with my personal favourite KMC. If you are wondering if it is worth learning new tool, this blogpost might be able to help you make your mind.

How exciting is parthenogenesis in condors?

6 minute read

Published:

Few days ago, the world learned about two California condor chicks that were products of parthenogenesis, a reproduction where unfertilised eggs hatch and develop in an adult from maternal genome only. This IS exciting for multiple reasons, but perhaps not as exiting for conservation of condors and I will try to explain why… It will take a bit of background on parthenogenesis and sex determination, but bear with me.

Morality of academic publishing

10 minute read

Published:

When I was young naive aspiring scientist I did not comprehend all the aspects of publishing. To be honest, I did not think about it much, but for me it’s the same as the climate change, it’s harder and harder to turn a blind eye. The last drop for me was the announcement of Nature’s Open Access option, it’s shocking €9,500, (or $11,390 / £8,290)! How did we come to this? Are we really going to let a private company to drain the already poor scholarly funds by these obscure amounts? And the problem is not just Nature…