Impact factor of PLoS ONE
Background Me and Björn has a bet on the impact factor of the journal PLoS ONE. PLoS ONE utilizes a new concept within publishing.The journal does not exclude any article based on percieved interest but publish everything that is technologically sound. As expected a lot of rubbish has ended up in the journal. Meanwhile, the journal has recieved a fair amount of publicity and PLoS has a good reputation. The bet was set as if PLoS gets an IF >1.2, Björn owes me a pizza, otherwise I owe Björn a pizza. As I’m impatient for ISI to calculate the IFs I’ve done it myself.
Method The citation report of all articles published in 2007 in PLoS ONE were retrieved using Google Scholar. Average number of citations were calculated using a simple perl script. As a a benchmark of the method the impact factor of BMC Genomics were calculated using the same approach.
Results Using the above mentioned method the IF of BMC Genomics was 4.90 for articles published in 2007. This is in line with their offical impact factor (4.18). Plos ONE had an Impact factor of 5.68.
Conclusion Well done PLoS ONE. Pizza for me.
Thanks for the valuable information. But, you didnt mention about the articles of Plos ONE pubslished in 2006, because as I know to calculate the IF of 2008, you should count the papers published in 2006 + 2007, and their citations in 2008.
Regards,
E. A.
E. A.
mars 19, 2009 vid 6:12 f m
Thanks E.A for your comment. You’re correct, the IF I’ve calculated is not the ”true” IF. However, my intention was only to find out if Plos ONE was likely to have an imapct factor >>1. My calculation is onle a rough estimate of Plos ONEs IF. It’ll be very interesting to see Plos ONEs’ true IF!
If I find time I’ll recalculate the IF with papers published for 2006 and 2007.
Cheers
Lenny
mars 19, 2009 vid 7:46 f m
Well done for the pizza, Lenny. The current situation with PLoS ONE is that it’s not indexed at Thomson’s ISI, which is the organization usually recognized to provide impact factors. This is the reason why you’ve waited for so long without seeing anything. In this case, unless there is a change, PLoS ONE will never have an official impact factor… PLoS ONE might have done this to protest against the current impact factor system. Or there might have been also a fear of receiving a terribly low impact factor due to their status which says that every paper will be published given that the content is scientifically sound. Still, this is a shame since, based on your estimation, its impact factor would have been quite good!
The Observator
april 7, 2009 vid 11:03 f m
Its probably going to be something more like 3 according to current data in Scopus but yes it should be greater than 1.2 (weird value btw).
Pedro Beltrao
april 28, 2009 vid 8:44 e m
Much worse than the low impact factor is the fact that it is not considered a peer-reviewed journal (due to the peer review mainly limited to the methods).
Dieter
augusti 5, 2009 vid 10:20 e m