Monthly Archives: July 2012

Physics and Astronomy at Western Blog, Physics and Astronomy at Western What's Happening

impact factors

We’ve had some discussion recently about the use of bibliometrics and impact factors as a way of evaluating research quality. Very recently, my collaborators chose to submit our joint paper to one journal rather than another because the chosen journal had a higher impact factor.

Today I found this interesting page, which gives the impact factors of physics journals:

http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~tmf20/physics_journals_impact_factor.shtml

You can see some interesting disciplinary differences even from this list: particle physics journals tend to have higher impact factors than condensed matter journals, for example. It is also interesting that overall there are very few physics journals with what one might call high impact factors: Phys. Rev. Lett., Nature Physics, and some review journals. Most of the rest (except for the particle physics journals) tend to have impact factors below 3. In contrast, many of the “normal” biochemistry journals have impact factors around 5.

This list doesn’t include a lot of the fluid mechanics journals I tend to publish in these days but they all have impact factors around 2 to 2.6.

What does this all mean? Your guess is as good as mine. But here is one interpretation (not mine!): Physics doesn’t have much impact.

Of course it is easy to raise the impact factor of the disicpline as a whole. All physicists simply have to cite twice as many papers as we normally would when we write our own papers. Of course it would also help if we all wrote twice as many papers as well, all of which cited lots of other papers. The result would be a huge number of useless papers with meaningless references, but Physics’s impact factor would go up. This should give you some idea of my view of the value of this statistic as a measure of the quality of research.

 

 

Physics and Astronomy at Western What's Happening

Welcome to our new blog pages

As we all know, our current blog site provider ‘Posterous’ was purchased by Twitter a while back, and so has an uncertain future.

We’ve decided to run the blog ourselves locally.

Our new blog is blog.physics.uwo.ca.

You’ll also notice that the “What’s Happening” and “Blogosphere” have been rolled into a single “What’s Happening” blog for now.

I hope you like the look. All comments are welcome.

Current contributors will be notified regarding their WordPress account information and other important stuff, like how to set up posting via email.

Contributors will notice that one side effect of moving our existing blogs from the old site is the loss of author byline information. Perhaps existing blog entries can be modified.

Physics and Astronomy at Western Blog

So what is a Brown Dwarf anyway?

I’ve been asked this question a lot as our exoplanet faculty search ran its course this winter and spring. God forbid a potential exoplanet find may actually turn out to be a brown dwarf! But why the distinction? There is a case to be made that any object that cannot initiate internal hydrogen fusion is a planet, period. BDs would then just be planets on the more massive end of the spectrum. On the other hand, some prefer to think that BDs should be thought of as more like stars since they have a similar formation mechanism. But do they? Increasingly the evidence is that BDs can form both in a star-like manner as well as through physical processes in a circumstellar disk, where planets are also formed. Should BDs be preserved as a separate third category of object? Perhaps, since they seem able to form both through disk processes and direct collapse of interstellar cloud fragments. Planets may be defined as objects that form only through an initial accumulation of solids in circumstellar disks. Stars form in all the same ways as BDs but can be distinguished from them by having a high enough internal temperature to initiate hydrogen fusion.

I was asked to write an article in Science magazine about some of these matters, and it just appeared in the July 6 issue:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6090/43.full.pdf

Physics and Astronomy at Western Blog, Physics and Astronomy at Western What's Happening

academic repression

I’ve just read the article that Pauline pointed us to in her comment on my earlier post. Here’s the link again:

http://www.dcscience.net/?p=5388

Read this article. It is really shocking. Faculty at Queen Mary University London (the other London) are being fired if they don’t publish enough papers, including a prescribed number in “high profile” journals. This is absurd. Faculty who complained about this evaluation policy are being investigated for misconduct. I was so angry after reading the article that I fired off an email to the president of QMUL. I urge you to do the same. Details in the above article.

Physics and Astronomy at Western Blog

CCA report on science funding released

In 2010, NSERC asked the Council of Canadian Academies to look into ways to assess research performance in the various NSERC disciplines. The resulting CCA report has now been released.

Here is a link:

http://www.scienceadvice.ca/en/assessments/completed/science-performance.aspx

This web page gives a brief summary of what’s in the report. You can also download the full report there if you want to. The full report is 162 pages long, and no, I haven’t read it yet.

At first glance, thoiugh, it appears to me that the conclusions of the report are reasonable. Here is a summary, taken from the above web page:

“After examining the available evidence, the Council’s Expert Panel came to a small number of key findings, listed below, and concluded overall that quantitative indicators should inform, rather than replace, expert judgment in science assessment for research funding allocation. The Expert Panel also developed four guiding principles to support research funding agencies undertaking science assessments in support of budget allocation, they are: context matters; do no harm; transparency is critical; and expert judgment remains invaluable. The principles are expanded upon with the Panel’s report.”

The “quantitative indicators” they are referring to are things like bibliometric measures, as discussed in one of my earlier posts.

Here are their “key findings:”

  • Many science indicators and assessment approaches are sufficiently robust to be used to assess science performance at the field level in natural sciences and engineering (NSE).
  • Quantitative indicators should inform, rather than replace, expert judgment in science assessment for research funding allocation.
  • International “best practices” offer limited insight into science indicator use and assessment strategies.
  • Mapping research funding allocation directly to quantitative indicators is far too simplistic, and is not a realistic strategy.
  • There is no compelling reason for certainty that past successes will lead to future successes or past failures to future failures. As a result, science indicators may not always provide a reliable guide to future prospects.

My understanding is that NSERC will give the research community an opportunity to respond to this report, although as yet we don’t know any details. As a member of CAP’s NSERC Liaison Committee, I will be involved in the physics part of this response, so feel free to pass your comments on to me. I also understand that NSERC will then take this report into consideration in deciding on a new Discovery Grant “reallocation process” to move money around among the disciplines. This means that it’s potentially quite important.