Why does Impact Factor persist most strongly in smaller countries

So, let's say that each of these smaller countries has a few thousand active research scientists. They can potentially all know each other. Those in the same field certainly all know each other. Furthermore, they more than just know each other - they are all each other's mentors, students, lab-buddies, classmates, etc., as such a country is likely to have only one major university in the capital and a few small universities in other large cities. It is all very....incestual.

Why do you assume that graduate students and post-docs in Norway will all be trained in Norway? That's not true in any other small country. The best students will be getting their training in the same places as the best students in America and Great Britain.

Good question. This will differ between countries, but most will get their training at home. Perhaps a brief postdoc abroad, but that is reserved for the few who can afford it or are really star potential. It would be interesting if someone did a comparative analysis of different countries - where people go to grad school, where they do postdocs, where they look for jobs. I am assuming that there would be a lot of cross-polination between EU-member countries, or between Canada and USA, but other countries would be much more closed and self-centers/sufficient.

I also omitted, on purpose, countries like Germany, UK, France, Canada, China, Russia, Japan, Australia, Italy....countries which have at least 2 out of 3: large population, large investment in science, long tradition of science. Some of those may be more like the USA and quick to move forward, while others will be more like a small country, moving slower. I do not have sufficient insight into those communities to say anything intelligent.

The bottom line for impact factor--or whatever other quantitative metric might replace or supplement it--is that people are lazy and time is highly rate limiting in the professional lives of academics. People are always gonna rely on something fast and easy to obtain--like a journal impact factor--than they are on something difficult and time consuming to obtain--like a developed opinion about the solidity and importance of a particular published paper.

Anything that is gonna replace impact factor of journals in which scientists publish papers as a metric for comparative assessment of scientific productivity is gonna have to be as braindead easy to deploy as impact factor.

True that, Comrade PhysioProf. But if we have to, I've always been in favor of a metric that measures how much scientists get cited. That's more important to me personally than where a scientist gets published--which is a considerably more subjective process than citation (although of course politics are involved in both processes).
And, without endorsing anything in particular--I recently discovered the "h index" that comes up with an author search on scopus.com, which is an interesting concept (I don't know if it has been used before scopus).

I added a bunch of related articles to the bottom of my post, several of which are critical of the H-index and demonstrate why it is not as good as initially thought.

(1) "People are always gonna rely on something fast and easy to obtain--like a journal impact factor" -- I find that slightly pessimistic, on the pessism to pragmatism/realism to optimism spectrum.

(2) There is a hierarchy of publication venues. That is part of the point of having "impact parameters" for journals. There are obvious differences in the value to your career in:

(a) handwritten or cheaply xeroxed rants handed out in supermarket parking lots;

(b) random blog or chat room comments;

[c] notes handed out in your classroom (if you are a professor or TA) [square brackets to stop your form system from rewriting this as a copyright symbol];

(d) an article in the local newspaper;

(e) a presentation or poster at a typical conference;

(f) a paper in the proceedings of a major international conference;

(g) a letter to the editor or short note in a professional journal;

(h) a research review in a professional journal;

(i) Original research presented in a professional journal;

(j) monograph or book from a major academic publisher;

(k) one's Field Medal or Nobel Prize acceptance speech with citations to the work that enabled it.

The problem is in mapping that to the world of PLOS, arXiv, important edited Math web sites (such as MathWorld or OEIS = The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences), superior science/math blogs (such as Shtetl-Optimized, Terry Tao's, the n-Category Cafe; Cosmic Variance, the Seed-umbrella?d Science Blogs, on the one hand; and on the other hand, Wikipedia (which seems to rangeover most of the quality spectrum from wonderful to abysmal). For that matter OEIS has a distinguished major CS/Math editor-in-chief (Dr. Neil J. A. Sloane) and a stellar set of associate editors, yet also acts blogular in that within its roughly 140,000 searchable web pages there are numerous sequences of no evident value to me, which appear unedited (sometimes with keywords such as "uned" for unedited, or "less" for less interesting to editors, or "probation" for will be deleted unless and editor wants to edit it).

Do these two hierarchies eventually collapse into one? The system of publishing, which includes academic gems and teenagers' solipsistic social network pages (My mood is as shown in the cartoon image, I'm listening to the non-broadcast hard-core new Eminem song, 7th grade sucks, and my boyfreind won't talk to me) is so far from equilibrium that it is essentially impossible to forecast the Web 3.0 chaotic attractor.

Dr.Vector says:

"So we have what you might call the Impact Factor Paradox: getting a real handle on something as slippery as the value of someone's scientific contributions is inevitably going to be time-consuming and hard; metrics that allegedly measure that value are going to fall along a spectrum from "time-consuming but accurate" to "quick, easy, and horribly flawed"; in a system where time is the limiting resource, there will always be a sort of grim undertow toward the quick-'n-greasy metrics."

This is very interesting post. Do you have any evidence that the decisions made in "smaller" countries are motivated more by IF than "other factors"? Is there any reason you think this affect outweighs the needs of high-in-demand universities/research groups in larger countries using IF in more public contests?

I was floored when I went to Serbia and saw the Table of detailed criteria (how many papers in how high IF journals)required for the promotion at each step of the academic ladder. I have been (as a grad student rep) on some job search committees here in the USA and IFs were never mentioned or taken into consideration - we were evaluating people in their entireties, carefully reading their statements, letter of rec, publications, etc. I have since heard that a number of other countries and institutions have similar writ-in-stone Tables.

Excuse my French - but this post has a large component of BS. You take anecdotal evidence from two small countries that you happen to have some superficial knowledge of, and leverage those anecdotes with some unfounded generalizations. The end result has no connection to any reality I know. I live and work in Israel (a small country, population ~6 million, 7 top-tier universities). In our system, people who want to compete for an academic position must travel for a postdoc abroad, and are usually competitive only if said postdoc resulted in a significant contribution published in high profile journals. People usually also switch fields for their postdoc. This requirement for people to go abroad and succeed elsewhere is reasonably effective at preventing inbreeding (although not 100%), with the caveat that some will never come back. I spent four years abroad for my postdoc, and found a job in Israel in a department and institute where nobody knew me before or had even heard of me before I started publishing from my postdoc. All the young faculty we have hired in the past 10 years had 4-6 year postdocs in the USA or Europe, and most of them did their PhD's in other universities. NONE of them were trained at any stage in our department. Nobody ever asked me for impact factor lists when I was hired, and we have never looked at impact factors for new faculty hirings since I joined the dept'. We look for scientific excellence, and the main criterion to judge that apart from the candidate's cv, publications and interview is by soliciting letters of reference from leaders in the candidate's field.
The European countries I know where impact factor reigns supreme are both large and small. If I had to hazard a guess I would venture that obsessive reliance on IF's is more a matter of history and culture than of size, but that would also be a dangerous generalization.

I think it's a valid hypothesis, but probably culture and the group dynamics among the individuals at an institution making the rules play a much larger role than the size of a country. I know one of the largest university hospitals in Germany, the Charité, ask their applicants to count their "impact points" not only for all publications, but for best five, best five first authors, best five last author and other ridiculous crap. I refused to apply for a position if the people at the institution are so blatantly brainless.
Germany is not small in Europe and still the IF idiocy is rampant.

Maybe it still persists because of their mental idleness (to read and take in consideration other documents or data), they still count - at least in Serbia - IF in 99% of cases. Of course, don't expect that IF DB's are accurate: people who work on IF data(indexers, librarians, IT staff) have odd criteria (or no criteria) to include your paper. For example, I have several published articles and papers that are not in SciIndex for unknown reasons (I don't know how often they update db), last paper dates from 2004. But in foreign institutions when I apply for something - they accept my list of publications, with CV and proposal, statement, bibliography, etc.
Serbian IF scientific community is not reliable to me.

Journal Impact Factor
= measure of the citations to science and social science journals

JIF is regarded as "the science of rating scientists and their research"

What does JIF have to do with "the science of rating scientists and their research"?

This is another glaring sad example of the prostituting, by the sience establishment guild of the 20th century Technology Culture, of the terms science, scientist and research.

I am asked if I have a better suggestion on how to rate scientists and research.

I do not pretend to have any suggestion on how now to scientifically rate scientists and research.

The present science establishment is, IMO, widely-deeply cancered with the malignant 20th century Technology Culture, of which public rating is one symptom. Tackling only this one single symptom would be a very difficult task.

My most probably hopeless approach is to stir the stagnant water and initiate evolutionary changes that would eventually re-place science, scientists and research where Western culture departed from Enlightenment circa 100 years ago, when it dealt with the essence of nature and life evolutions, and elected to become a pierced-ear slave (Ex.21, 6) to the Technology Culture .

IMO it is vitally important for now charting the course of our society to learn and understand, to analyse and assess, with a scientism perspective, the evolution and collapse of the Technology Culture and the implications, within it, of the bare survival of basic classical science, of the further comprehension of our place and fate in the universe.

Respectfully suggesting,

Dov Henis
(Comments From The 22nd Century)
Updated Life's Manifest May 2009
http://www.physforum.com/index.php?showtopic=14988&st=495&#entry412704