Editorial

Thomson Reuters recently released the 2016 Journal Impact Factors. In case any reader has wandered in from another world where careers are not dictated by citation metrics, a journal’s Impact Factor is calculated as the number of citations in any year to ‘citable’ articles published in the journal in the two previous years, divided by the number published in those years. Brain’s Impact Factor has risen to an all-time high of 10.292. This is of course a welcome vindication of the effort that has gone into refereeing and copy-editing manuscripts, and producing and promoting the journal. Most importantly, thanks are due to the authors of manuscripts and scientific commentaries for having chosen to publish in Brain. The Impact Factor is, of course, an imperfect measure, and Goodhart’s law (in a nutshell, ‘when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure’) applies just as it does to the h-index and any other indicator of scientific performance. A moment’s browsing of Impact Factors reveals the interesting news, for instance, that Brain has been overtaken by The Journal of Pineal Research. I do not doubt the importance of the pineal gland. It was, after all, thought by René Descartes to be the seat of the soul, and identified by Mme Blavatsky and the Theosophists as the Third Eye, and therefore highly deserving of enquiry. Disappointingly, however, these topics do not seem to feature in the Journal of Pineal Research, which instead focuses almost exclusively on the effects of melatonin on myriad biological and pathological processes. It is tempting to speculate that enthusiasm for melatonin research is shared by a group of authors who tend to publish in the same journal. Indeed, when the Impact Factor calculation is adjusted to remove citations by articles published in the same journal, Brain comfortably comes out on top.

from #ORL-AlexandrosSfakianakis via ola Kala on Inoreader http://ift.tt/2tY3W7x
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