Last week a few things happened in the world of science. One was the publication of the Journal Impact Factors (JIFs)… Followed by journals saying how wonderful their JIF is… And then everyone else saying how awful impact factors are. Methods in Ecology and Evolution is a journal, so naturally we’re obliged to take journal point of view. Which means we need to get really … Continue reading Our 2019 Impact Factor: Now We are Seven
Last week many of us were at the Ecology Across Borders meeting in Ghent, catching up with friends, making new friends, and listening to talks about the latest ecological science. Many of us, of course, were also following social media. On the statistics social media scene a lot of attention was being paid to a post on Medium by Kristian Lum: Statistics, we have a … Continue reading Ecology, do we have a problem?
This week is Peer Review Week, the slightly more popular academic celebration than pier review week. Peer review is an essential part of scientific publication and is – like Churchill’s democracy – the worst system to do it. Except for all of the others. The reason it’s imperfect is mainly that it’s done by people, so there is a natural desire to try to improve it.
One suggestion for improvement is to us double blind reviews. At the moment most journals (including Methods in Ecology and Evolution) use single blind reviewing, where the author isn’t told the identity of the reviewers. The obvious question is whether double blind reviewing does actually improve reviews: does it reduce bias, or improve quality? There have been several studies in several disciplines which have looked at this and related questions. After having looked at them, my summary is that double blind reviewing is fairly popular, but makes little or no difference to the quality of the reviews, and reviewers can often identify the authors of the papers.
Continue reading “Peer Review Week: Should we use double blind peer review? The evidence…”
The annual flagellation of scientist is here – we all know the impact factor is awful, but some people still think it is important. So, here is ours…
6.344
Once more, it is a number with three decimal places.
Continue reading “The MEE 2015 Impact Factor”
Thomson-Reuters have just released this year’s Impact Factors. The Methods in Ecology and Evolution Impact Factor is now an astounding 6.554, up from a truly dismal 5.322 last year. We now have enough years of Impact Factors to make it worthwhile drawing a graph.
This puts us ninth in Ecology, and we would be fifth in Evolutionary Biology if Thomson-Reuters thought we published stuff in Evolutionary Biology. We would also be top in Statistics and Substance Abuse if we could get ourselves into either of those categories. Continue reading “The Methods in Ecology and Evolution 5th Anniversary Impact Factor”
Yesterday Thomson-Reuters finally released their impact factors for 2013. And ours is … 5.322 Which has gone down by 0.602 from last year. This also means we’ve moved down to 15th in the Ecology rankings. And what is worse is that the Journal of Ecology has overtaken us! Impact factors are notorious for only covering 2 years of citations, which is not a long time … Continue reading Our New Impact Factor (or why the five year impact factor is much much much more important)
Last May we started a trial with Altmetric, using their tools to track the online presence of papers, e.g. on Twitter, blogs, and Facebook. Each paper gets an Altmetric score, which is updated as more data comes in. So, for example, this paper currently has a score of 42 (and boy will I be upset with myself if this blog post pushes it higher than … Continue reading Altmetrics: how was the trial for you?
Sometimes you read a paper and think “ooh, that’s cool”. As an editor you get the added delight that it’s a manuscript submitted to your journal, so you get to think “ooh, I really want to have that in the journal”. This is followed by “I hope it’s good enough”. At Methods we’ve just published one of those manuscripts where that was my reaction. And it was good enough.
Continue reading “Be nice to vandals, and they won’t be vandals?”
In case you haven’t seen this over the past few days, the Journal of Applied Ecology wants a new Senior Editor. The job will be to work with the other Editors “to determine journal strategy and to increase the reputation and quality of the Journal, in addition to making decisions on around 1000 manuscripts submitted each year”. If it’s anything like MEE, it is a … Continue reading Join one of our sister journals
Those of you who have looked carefully at the MEE submission system will know that, like a lot of other journals, we use the ScholarOne software to organise our review process. ScholarOne (who are owned by Thomson-Reuters: suppliers of Impact Factors to the gentry since 1975) have decided to run a Journal Triathlon this autumn. So, they are asking for nominations for journals in three categories:
You can read about the competition on the competition’s webpage, and also on their blog. You can also nominate a journal on the webpage, or vote for us as the greatest journal in the world.
Continue reading “Journal Triathlon”
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