Timeline for Australian Mathematical Society journal rankings
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
12 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 18, 2020 at 4:21 | comment | added | David Roberts♦ | @Yemon in the other direction, my faculty (Engineering + Comp Sci + Maths) recently singled out a paper I published as being high-impact and praised it up, when it was not much more than a bunch of uncomplicated long exact sequence calculations in a physics context. The only reason I could guess is that the IF of the journal (a physics journal) is higher than the IF of basically every other maths journal, so I think they'd normalised IF by field of research, then found I was top of the pack? | |
| Aug 18, 2020 at 4:17 | comment | added | David Roberts♦ | @Yemon I was in a group convo with someone who thought it was no big deal they themselves had published in the Annals. Like it was somehow ordinary?? (BTW, my comment should really have said "Math. Ann." and "Ann. Math.") | |
| Aug 18, 2020 at 2:36 | comment | added | Yemon Choi | @DavidRoberts I can't resist mentioning one of my over-used stories which is that when I was hired at USask 10 years ago (youtube.com/watch?v=avtK9Bz0sPg ) I was stunned to learn that someone there had just had a paper published in Annals and that no one was making a big deal. I then learned over the next 3 years that all deans etc outside the dept neither knew nor cared about some particular maths journal that some particular maths prof chose to publish in | |
| Aug 16, 2020 at 1:47 | comment | added | David Roberts♦ | @R.vanDobbendeBruyn yes, if only to prove to university administrators that one's article published in Annals of Mathematics is really that much better than one's colleague's article published in Mathematische Annalen. | |
| Aug 16, 2020 at 1:38 | comment | added | R. van Dobben de Bruyn | (Like the OP I believe that rankings ― although ultimately inevitably flawed ― do serve a useful purpose. But the IMU's stance that @DavidRoberts shared is also a very healthy one, and just like any other scientist using data we should at least justify our choice and interpretation of metrics.) | |
| Aug 16, 2020 at 1:36 | comment | added | R. van Dobben de Bruyn | One neat alternative to impact factor for slower moving fields like mathematics is the normalised lifetime impact factor described in this answer. (It uses Acta as a baseline to normalise for differences in overall research output throughout recent history in order to produce outcomes independent of age of a journal.) This is just one example with its own flaws, but it shows that alternatives exist, and we could be thinking about even better systems. | |
| Aug 15, 2020 at 13:06 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by S. Carnahan♦ | ||
| Aug 15, 2020 at 2:21 | comment | added | David Roberts♦ | Here's a better citation for the rather average performance of high-IF science journals: Brembs B (2018) Prestigious Science Journals Struggle to Reach Even Average Reliability. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 12:37. doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00037 Needless to say, three decimal place accuracy on a noisy quantity that for most mathematics journals is less than 2 is a ridiculous way to break ties. One would be better placed just rounding to the IF of maths journals to nearest integer and grouping journals that way, if one absolutely must use such a metric. | |
| Aug 15, 2020 at 2:10 | comment | added | David Roberts♦ | Impact factor is a terrible metric, and in experimental sciences has been shown to be positively correlated with retractions, and there is no correlation between IF and statistical power (which indicates studies with good evidence) Source: bjoern.brembs.net/2016/01/…. One should also look at the International Mathematical Union's position on citation metrics: mathunion.org/fileadmin/IMU/Report/CitationStatistics.pdf | |
| Aug 14, 2020 at 21:36 | vote | accept | anon | ||
| Aug 14, 2020 at 21:32 | comment | added | anon | Thank you, I appreciate your taking time to compile this list. It is versatile and I did not know about many of these. It seems that none of these satisfy my desire that the list not be simply based on citation statistics, but there is apparently no other such thing (except perhaps the Chilean one you mention unfavorably.) | |
| Aug 14, 2020 at 18:41 | history | answered | David White | CC BY-SA 4.0 |