habits by both authors and journal editors.”Editorial boards are keen on
impact factors for their journals and editors may be tempted to go for pub-
lications that are likely to attract citations rather than articles that have a
high quality but are more mainstream.
Journal impact factors are beginning to play a role in ourfield. Of course,
editors and editorial boards of journals keep an eye on impact factors, but
the data show that there is some variation in scores over time, albeit not a
clear trend. The tendency of journals to increase the number of issues per
year to deal with the large number of submissions also leads, on the one
hand, to more publications that could cite the articles of a given journal,
since the total volume of articles increases. On the other hand, there could
be a tendency toward a lowering of the number of citations per article,
because there must be more articles that attract citations to have a high
impact factor.
The importance of citations and impact factors is here to stay, despite all
the criticism that has been voiced against it. To what extent high impact
factors are a sign of the strength of a research community is a matter of
debate. Indices have been shown to be manipulable and in that sense can
never be the last word in important decisions. The pressure to publish in
international peer-reviewed journals, typically the ones that will play a role
in citation counts, has become stronger and the effects of this change have to
be studied. Some argue that pressure to publish has led to too many second-
class articles, and to the squeezing out of one set of data for as many
publications as possible.
Finally, the work by Paul Meara on co-citation analysis may be very useful
to get a better idea of the structure of thefield, since it allows for analyses
that show the clusters of researchers working on similar topics.
Notes
1 Paul Meara (p.c.) adds:“Another problem with GS is that it tries to be compre-
hensive, and this means that it includes a lot of rubbish publications–papers that
appear in obscure journals that don’t really make a contribution to the subject.
These papers tend to cite the big names as a sort of automatic reflex (vocabulary:
must cite Nation), and this means that the big names get more and more
citations.”
2 I am grateful to our librarian Michiel Thomas for helping mefind thesefigures.References
Cole, J. and Cole, S. (1973)Social Stratification in Science, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Falagas, M., Pitsouni, E., Malietzis, G. and Pappas, G. (2008)“Comparison of PubMed,
Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar: Strengths and weaknesses”,FASEB
Journal, vol. 22, no. 2: 338–42.
Firth, A. and Wagner, J. (1997)“On discourse, communication and (some) fundamental
concepts in SLA research”,The Modern Language Journal, vol. 81, no. 3: 285–300.
120 The citation game