Pickering and Noruzi articles on citation metrics (via Peter Suber)

Peter Suber forwarded these abstracts of recent articles on the limits (real or imagined) of Web impact factors.

jon

+++

Bobby Pickering, Thomson attacks Scopus Citation Tracker feature, Information World Review, February 17, 2006.
[ http://www.iwr.co.uk/2150515 ] http://www.iwr.co.uk/2150515

Thomson has three objections: (1) that Elsevier only tracks citation data back 10 years, so far, (2) that Elsevier focuses on the natural and social sciences instead of covering all disciplines, and (3) that Elsevier moves away from pre-defined
metrics like impact factors and lets users view citation data in many different ways, including citations per article and citations per author.

My take: Thomson is clearly construing every difference from its own model as a weakness. While the first two are real weaknesses, they're also side-effects of the newness of the service and will likely disappear over time. The third is actually
a strength of the Elsevier model. As citation data become available for many different kinds of processing, Thomson has decided to fight a losing battle: defending the impact factor as the single best perspective on the data, even one that is
necessary to make sense of every other perspective.

Peter

+++

Alireza Noruzi, "The Web Impact Factor : a critical review," The Electronic
Library 24 (2006). Self-archived February 9, 2006.
http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00005543/

Abstract: We analyse the link-based web site impact measure known as the
Web Impact Factor (WIF). It is a quantitative tool for evaluating and
ranking web sites, top-level domains and sub-domains. We also discuss the
WIF's advantages and disadvantages, data collection problems, and validity
and reliability of WIF results. A key to webometric studies has been the
use of large-scale search engines, such as Yahoo and AltaVista that allow
measurements to be made of the total number of pages in a web site and the
total number of backlinks to the web site. These search engines provide
similar possibilities for the investigation of links between web
sites/pages to those provided by the academic journals citation databases
from the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI). But the content of the
Web is not of the same nature and quality as the databases maintained by
the ISI. This paper reviews how the WIF has been developed and applied. It
has been suggested that Web Impact Factors can be calculated as a way of
comparing the attractiveness of web sites or domains on the Web. It is
concluded that, while the WIF is arguably useful for quantitative
intra-country comparison, application beyond this (i.e., to inter-country
assessment) has little value. The paper attempts to make a critical review
over literature on the WIF and associated indicators.