Evaluative bibliometrics compares the citation impact of researchers, research groups and institutions with each other across time scales and disciplines. Both factors - discipline and period - have an influence on the citation count which is independent of the quality of the publication. Normalizing the citation impact of papers for these two factors started in the mid-1980s. Since then, a ran...

Once upon a time, case reports were the primary content of scholarly medical journals. Case reports are still common but have come to be viewed more often than not as anecdotes rather than evidence. And even though David Sackett referred to the important link between clinical expertise and external evidence,(1) the "gold standard" today is the randomized controlled clinical trial. Why is this?

The impact factor has been widely adopted as a proxy for journal quality. It is used by libraries to guide purchase and renewal decisions, by researchers deciding where to publish and what to read, by tenure and promotion committees laboring under the assumption that publication in a higher impact factor journal represents better work, and by editors and publishers as a means to evaluate and pr...

The old Asian legend about the blind men and the elephant comes to mind when looking at how different authors of scientific papers describe a piece of related prior work. It turns out that different citations to the same paper often focus on different aspects of that paper and that neither provides a full description of its full set of contributions. In this paper we will describe our investiga...

The Eigenfactor Metrics provide an alternative way of evaluating scholarly journals based on an iterative ranking procedure analogous to Google’s PageRank algorithm. These metrics have recently been adopted by Thomson-Reuters and are listed alongside the Impact Factor in the Journal Citation Reports. But do these metrics differ sufficiently so as to be a useful addition to the bibliometric tool...