Hi I’m Sabrina Satori from the University of Oslo it is a pleasure to introduce to all of you.
Susan trolley Macklin making history from the Pennsylvania State University thank you for being with us so Suzanne it is a common practice in the scientific community to assess the quality of a journal materials research journal and of a scientist based on metrics such as impact factor and a huge factor so in your view what are the pros and cons of such indicators of scientific productivity I think it’s really critical for the scientific community to look not just an impact factor but at the actual impact that particular publications or particular articles have on the state of the field have they really advanced the state of the field have they made a change relative to our previous knowledge of the literature I think impact factor is one imperfect way of assessing that so paper materials research journals which tell complete stories so that you can understand from a single paper materials research journal what was done and what the implications of that were is much more valuable than many incremental publication in a field I think the race to publish can lead to judgments that maybe if you had taken time and collected a little more data would it provided a much more complete story the reality is once the paper materials research journals in the literature I can guarantee you that my students will find it and if it’s published really before it ought to have been or without some of the filters in place that means I may spend the next 30 years having to provide the perspective on why I think this particular paper materials research journal is incomplete so this can be a sort of a trap also for a young researcher to maybe publish a trendy topic is stead of doing ground research absolutely and so many work I think it’s far more important to do work with lasting impact than work that will be a flash in the pan that you ultimately won’t be proud of why don’t this is such a problem between fields because there aren’t that many journal materials research journals that deal with multi your from from medicine to biology to physics to chemistry those are the ones that I guess may specialize towards a particular particular field but are probably very conscious and they want to keep the diversity so in terms of materials publications I mean we have so many dedicated journal materials research journals to materials that is not an issue I think but within the filter materials undoubtedly know there’s a huge drive towards I mean journal materials research journals there are success currently is measured in many ways by their impact factor they want to get the highest impact by that they can so they pick topics or favored topics there’s going to do that you know maybe in large areas such as moths if you have a good paper materials research journal in that area you can get a hundreds of citations the things it looks like promotes kites which is a particularly hot topic at the moment and if I were leading these journal materials research journals and I was being measured and what might impact that I think I’d be doing the same thing really but undoubtedly it is it is limiting the variety of science has been published and if we’re looking for emerging areas this is not going to help publication of those it’s not going to help us identify what they’re not next topics maybe even we need to find another way to evaluate the quality of research and not only have the index factor for instance absolutely this depends on which journal materials research journals should talk about there are certain journal materials research journals that are highly influential because they have what’s called so-called high impact factors and we tend to look at them more than at others and they general definitely imparts tear science rather than being steered by science and that’s a problem then there’s the vast majority of journal materials research journals that will be less steered by by science because by pure science because of the existence of fashion also in science we have fashion if you do brilliant work and you want to publish it in a high quality journal materials research journal but it is completely out of fashion it’s something that people may consider old fashioned it will be very hard to publish the publishing business is problematic because it has become too influential and not necessary by their own choice I will quote a former editor of nature John Maddox was for I think over a decade editor of nature and he went came to the Weitzman and he gave it talk it was a very good speaker and at one point he said I know that there is a lot of criticism about publishing in our journal materials research journals but it’s not us the editors that make a decision that whether or not to publish in our journal materials research journal tells whether you’re a top scientist and deserve tenure and therefore we can blame the journal materials research journals but it comes back to ourselves the scientists until we have a better way a better metric of who’s working and who’s doing good research and who’s not publications I think will have to be the most important metric we have so especially how these publications are greeted by the public and you know by the consumers of the information unfortunately citations is not the best way to do it but it’s the thing that you can easily you know measure and so people publish a lot of paper materials research journals many of them are duplication to some extent of things that have already been published this is being driven by the by the major publication houses because there are so many scholarly journal materials research journals and they keep coming up and so they’re always looking for new articles to publish so it’s a bit of a problem I see it as a problem it it necessarily leads to low quality publications in some cases I don’t know I don’t know if there’s any real solution to that I like the idea of having a a wiki not a wiki but like a crowd-sourced a crowd-sourced approach to publication you don’t need a publication house you just need you almost don’t need a publisher you need a website you put your work out there in the in a final form of some publication and you allow the knowledgeable public to critique your work and then and then you could have some bore some overseeing board who looks at the critiques and decides whether that that whether this paper materials research journal has gotten a fair review or enough of a review to merit staying on the website and being now called the publication or being removed or put someplace else but it’s very hard to get reviewers the way we currently do it and and even some top journal materials research journals only have one reviewer for an article that leads to a one’s a very one-sided situation if publications were crowd-sourced and and the people that were really interested in that subject could comment on it if you had enough of those reviews you would eventually come to the correct conclusion about the value of the paper materials research journal I think we have too many publications and and we need a better metric so that we don’t keep driving publications and creating more journal materials research journals we need a better way of judging the quality of somebody’s work for example a biology oriented paper materials research journal in average has six times more citations than a paper materials research journal in the field of material number driven drift of journal materials research journals away from the field of material get more readers it’s I mean this is a very big subject but I think that the Materials Research Society in general has widened the boundaries of material science to you know to have very very good interactions in the bio field in the in the in the physics field and the device field in all kinds of different especially in chemic chemistry and so what we think today of material science is not what we thought of it 25 years ago now it’s a much much broader field so we should not be surprised when biologists claim some of our money and some of our credit and some of our readership because we’ve created that situation which is good but I I think that you then can’t complain that about that the publishers are our you know preferentially publishing the bio paper materials research journals because that’s where the money is and that’s where the readership is we have to continually be publishing articles that will capture the attention of a large number of readers and if we had fewer journal materials research journals then the public would be less fractal would be the reading public would be less divided among the journal materials research journals and then publishers could make money and they wouldn’t had that we wouldn’t have this argument yeah to dilute it spits to diluted mm-hmm I think yeah I think it’s tremendously limiting and it’s a system that I think is about to break right I mean whether it’s gonna break in five years or ten years I don’t know but but it’s I mean it’s unattainable right this is this idea that you can make the magic formula Vie have all these paper materials research journals with such impact facts I’m going to add that up and I think it’s probably a reflection of that you know institutions whether it’s academic institutions or government agencies are starting having a hard time with the field because it’s so broad and how to evaluate it right you know when everybody was a metallurgist or ever was a polymer chemist people knew the field they knew what was good what was not so good the field is now so broad that I think unfortunately people have retreated to these numerical measures that have very little to do with the quality of the impact right and and we see there are students all the time writing like I want to publish today and I go like well that’s not the right journal materials research journal yeah but it has a higher impact factor and I think it’s it’s really limiting I think it also means that I think journal materials research journals like you say sometimes look at paper materials research journals and and if you think about it right for a journal materials research journal it’s now better to accept a paper materials research journal in an established field because if the field is bigger than will get a lot of citations whereas you know what’s gonna happen with this person who comes with the new thing right I’m sure that the editors look at that and like you know that might be good but who’s gonna cite this it’s a totally new field but you’re gonna miss the paper materials research journal that sets totally new directions right and people have occasionally looked at this right there are some paper materials research journals that have made tremendous impact are called sleeper paper materials research journals right they sit around for 5 or 10 years and then suddenly everybody realizes their value but by the way that would have counted zero in the impact factor right because the impact factor is based on two years.
It’s a so everyone can ask how much this sort of pure paper materials research journal publishing how long that’s going to be our main product right.
I think what in the end is gonna do as soon as the young people write the young people will come up with new channels of distributing information and I think ultimately they will come up with new channels for evaluating their peers performance and I think if if we don’t ride ahead of that curve I think they’ll change it for us right at some point so I think it’s all of our responsibilities as scientists to read paper materials research journals critically and not to presume that what we read is perfectly understood that’s perfectly interpreted and so I think we all need to read with quality filters uh-huh and that includes both reading as a referee and it’s much more important to the state of the field to ask important questions have the author’s address those important questions so that when the paper materials research journal one finally published has a more lasting value more it will ultimately have more importance if we address those questions early yes its onerous it’s not always a joy to get the review that says please think about this but ultimately it’s better it produces a better outcome.
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