Sunday, February 26, 2006

The value of academic research papers

What is the value of academic publishing? The purpose is to document new discovery or to contribute to the body of knowledge. Recent years, we have seen some efforts to quantify and measure these values. One of such metric is the "impact factor" for academic journals:
However, the correctness of these metrics are still subject to debate. Most of them are measurements of citations, and pretty much limited to English language pulications. There are many concerns about such a practice:
Ultimately, what is the impact factor of the journals who published Einstein's paper on relativity?

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