Lunch and Learn: Impact Factors: What They Mean, What They Don’t Mean, and Why You Should Care, presented by Elana Broch

Note that only audio was recorded for this ses­sion, but the PDF of the pre­sen­ta­tion is avail­able here for you to fol­low along: Elana Broch: Impact Factors

You may have noticed jour­nals’ announce­ments of their “impact fac­tor” on their home page.  “We’re num­ber 1” sounds good, but what does it really mean?  I’ll begin with a quick overview of Web of Sci­ence, the data­base that forms the basic for the cal­cu­la­tions of the impact fac­tor, show how impact fac­tor is cal­cu­lated, and the fac­tors that influ­ence its inter­pretabil­ity.  Finally, we’ll dis­cuss alter­na­tives to the impact factor.

Speaker bio:

Elana Broch is the assis­tant pop­u­la­tion research librar­ian in Stokes Library here at Prince­ton.  Before com­ing to Prince­ton, she worked as a mea­sure­ment sta­tis­ti­cian on the GRE at Edu­ca­tional Test­ing Ser­vice. She earned a PhD in Psy­cho­me­t­ric Meth­ods from the Uni­ver­sity of Min­nesota before earn­ing her Master’s degree in Library and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence.  Her dis­ser­ta­tion “An inves­ti­ga­tion of the effect of item com­plex­ity and dimen­sion strength on item para­me­ter recov­ery in mul­ti­di­men­sional datasets,” has one (incom­plete cita­tion) in Web of Science.”