ArticleFrontiers in human neuroscience2013
Deep impact: unintended consequences of journal rank.
Article in Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 87 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
87 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- A Review of Journal Impact Metrics and Characteristics to Assist Emergency Medicine Investigators with Manuscript Submission Decisions.The western journal of emergency medicine · 2020Pooled it
- Article
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- A framework for assessing the trustworthiness of scientific research findings.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
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- Current status of dental journals published by Japanese organization.The Japanese dental science review · 2024Review
- Bibliometric top ten healthcare-related ChatGPT publications in the first ChatGPT anniversary.Narra J · 2024Article
- Messing with Merton: The intersection between open science practices and Mertonian values.Accountability in research · 2024Article
- Journal metrics of the top-ranked Orthopaedic, Medical, and Surgical journals - A cross-sectional, comparative study.International orthopaedics · 2024Article
- Towards responsible research assessment: How to reward research quality.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Teaching epistemic integrity to promote reliable scientific communication.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Replication of population-level differences in auditory-motor synchronization ability in a Norwegian-speaking population.Communications psychology · 2023Article
- The future of academic publishing.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- Female Dynamics in Authorship of Scientific Publications in the Public Library of Science: A 10-year Bibliometric Analysis of Biomedical Research.European journal of investigation in health, psychology and education · 2023Article
- Study results from journals with a higher impact factor are closer to "truth": a meta-epidemiological study.Systematic reviews · 2023Article
- International aspects in healthcare and medical education: Scientometric trends and knowledge maps before the COVID-19 pandemic.Journal of education and health promotion · 2023Article
- Access to scholarly publications in the global North and the global South-Copyright and the need for a paradigm shift under the right to science.Frontiers in sociology · 2023Article
- How do we measure the costs, benefits, and harms of sharing data from biomedical studies? A protocol for a scoping review.Open research Europe · 2023Article
- Quality Output Checklist and Content Assessment (QuOCCA): a new tool for assessing research quality and reproducibility.BMJ open · 2022Review
27 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Most researchers acknowledge an intrinsic hierarchy in the scholarly journals ("journal rank") that they submit their work to, and adjust not only their submission but also their reading strategies accordingly. On the other hand, much has been written about the negative effects of institutionalizing journal rank as an impact measure. So far, contributions to the debate concerning the limitations of journal rank as a scientific impact assessment tool have either lacked data, or relied on only a few studies. In this review, we present the most recent and pertinent data on the consequences of our current scholarly communication system with respect to various measures of scientific quality (such as utility/citations, methodological soundness, expert ratings or retractions). These data corroborate previous hypotheses: using journal rank as an assessment tool is bad scientific practice. Moreover, the data lead us to argue that any journal rank (not only the currently-favored Impact Factor) would have this negative impact. Therefore, we suggest that abandoning journals altogether, in favor of a library-based scholarly communication system, will ultimately be necessary. This new system will use modern information technology to vastly improve the filter, sort and discovery functions of the current journal system.
Indexed as
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.