The discussion centers around the relatively low impact factor of the journal Physical Review Letters (PRL) compared to other scientific journals, particularly in the context of the quality and significance of the papers published there. Participants explore how impact factors are calculated, the implications of comparing journals across different fields, and the criteria for publication in PRL versus other journals.
Participants express differing views on the validity of comparing impact factors across disciplines, with some agreeing that such comparisons are problematic while others argue for the need to normalize based on field size. The discussion remains unresolved regarding the implications of PRL's impact factor and the criteria for publication in different journals.
Limitations in the discussion include assumptions about the significance of impact factors, the criteria for publication in various journals, and the varying sizes of research communities across fields. There is also a lack of consensus on how to fairly assess the importance of journals based on their impact factors.
kelly0303 said:how do they define the impact factor of a journal
I am aware of that, my questions was more along the lines, shouldn't they normalize the journal for a fair comparison? If you have 100 physicists and 98 of them read a journal, and you have 1000 doctors and 500 of them read another journal, you can't say that the medical one is more important. It just seems unfair to asses the importance of a journal without taking into account the area of research. So I was wondering how much is that taken into account?Vanadium 50 said:If you type those exact words into Google, you get plenty of answers. How are they insufficient?
Next, PRL is what, around 10? Why is that bad? There are maybe 20000 physicists in the US. There are a million doctors. Doesn't it make sense that medical journals have more readers and citations?
Oh, you brought up that there are more doctors than physicists and I was just saying that if you want to compare them you should normalize based on that numbers. Not sure why you mentioned doctors. But to put it the other way, from the point of view of physics, PRL has an impact factor of 9 while, say, Nature has an impact factor of 43. Also it is a lot more difficult to get published in Nature than PRL. However there are lots of famous (and even Nobel Prize winning) papers in PRL. So I am just confused as to why it's a factor of 5 difference between the 2, given that PRL seems to be really good.Vanadium 50 said:Why? Why would you ever compare JAMA to PRL? They have no overlapping readership and no overlapping articles.
kelly0303 said:Why does PRL have such a small impact factor? There are so many great papers published there (if I am not wrong the Higgs discovery, too?), how do they define the impact factor of a journal?
kelly0303 said:Oh, you brought up that there are more doctors than physicists and I was just saying that if you want to compare them you should normalize based on that numbers. Not sure why you mentioned doctors. But to put it the other way, from the point of view of physics, PRL has an impact factor of 9 while, say, Nature has an impact factor of 43. Also it is a lot more difficult to get published in Nature than PRL. However there are lots of famous (and even Nobel Prize winning) papers in PRL. So I am just confused as to why it's a factor of 5 difference between the 2, given that PRL seems to be really good.
What do you mean by different field? Isn't Nature a physics journal, too? I know for a fact that publishing a physics paper in Nature is a lot more complicated than in PRL so I was wondering why? Is it because of their impact factor? And if so, why does Nature has a bigger impact factor than PRL? And if not, why is it harder to get published in Nature?DrClaude said:The impact factor is greatly influenced by the size of a field, i.e., how many papers in total are published in a year. There is no point to compare impact factors across fields.
Well given that Nature is 45, and I think it's the most difficult journal to publish in as a physicist, I guess there is a lot of room in between. I am not even sure what other journals fill the space between RPL and Nature in terms of impact factor.Vanadium 50 said:What DrClaude said.
If you think "9" is too small, what number do you think it should be?
No, Nature covers all fields of scientific enquiry, including biology and medicine, which contribute a lot to the high impact factor.kelly0303 said:What do you mean by different field? Isn't Nature a physics journal, too?
Nature publishes very few physics papers (around 3 per issue), so they can be very picky. In fact, they are very picky in all fields: they would much rather reject an excellent paper than accept one that turns out to be not very good (although they have made some blunders: look up Benveniste).kelly0303 said:I know for a fact that publishing a physics paper in Nature is a lot more complicated than in PRL so I was wondering why? Is it because of their impact factor? And if so, why does Nature has a bigger impact factor than PRL? And if not, why is it harder to get published in Nature?