Chapter 204 Impact Factor

Speaking of the major event in the academic world in June, it must be that ISI will officially announce the impact factors of this year's SCI journals.

What is impact factor and why is it so important in academia?

In fact, it is very simple, because it can tell you with the most sufficient data and without any subjective factors, which country has stronger scientific and technological strength now!

As a member of the academic community, Wu Bin is of course also very concerned about the announcement of impact factors, because it allows him to fully understand the general scientific research situation around the world and China last year.

When turning on the computer, Wu Bin couldn't help but think of what Professor Lin complained about yesterday: "Our country is a weak country in science and technology in the eyes of most people."

But you can’t blame ordinary people who don’t care about scientific research, because scientific research needs to go through several steps before it can enter daily life and become an ordinary object around you.

The first is the basic research that most scientists need to do, including cells, atoms, and materials. They represent the foundation of the scientific and technological building.

Next comes applied research, such as the graphene Wu Bin is currently studying. Only after he has thoroughly studied the properties of the material can researchers in related fields think about how to apply it to their own applications based on the basic properties of the material. among the research fields.

When the application is successful, a factory will build it, and then it will enter the eyes of ordinary people.

To give a simple example, the ballpoint pen is an extremely common thing, and absolutely no one would regard it as high technology.

However, in fact, the pen oil of ballpoint pens is very particular. The basic ingredients include dyes, film-forming agents, solvents, dispersants and other additives.

Not to mention the small ball pen tip with extremely high technical content.

Why is the ballpoint pen called a ballpoint pen, and why does it not ensure that excess pen oil leaks out while writing? It is because the thickness of the bowl mouth of the ball base body where the small ballpoints are placed is only 0.4 mm, and it actually has to withstand when you write. Under great pressure, if the material used is not strong enough, it will easily break.

And how to solve these problems? It depends on those basic scientific workers.

Therefore, it is a very long process from the research direction to the manufacturing of something, and the finished product may not necessarily meet the high-tech concept of most people.

The reason why people think that China's science and technology is weak is because the Chinese people actually went from being oppressed by foreign powers to having enough to eat, and now they have become the "strongest developing country". In fact, in just a few decades, many things have changed. It is still in basic research or even theory, and it will take a lot of time to really explode.

You must know that China is a country that completely missed the first and second industrial revolutions. The basic theory actually has many loopholes. It can only be described as incredible that it has caught up to this step.

Thinking of this, Wu Bin often thinks of a sentence that Li Yan especially liked to complain about when he was browsing Weibo.

“The media uses their mouths to do scientific research, while scientists use their hands. It’s clear who can set the pace better.”

Back to the impact factor, it is the most powerful data used to measure the success of basic research.

Because the results of basic research cannot be directly displayed as finished products, most of them are published in the form of papers.

So how do you know the quality of a paper? Just look at the number of citations it has.

Those papers that have been cited hundreds or thousands of times must be good articles. There is no hype in them. Buying data or buying fake army. Only serious people will cite them. Of course, there are some A masterpiece submerged in flooded articles.

The impact factor is the average number of citations of articles in this journal.

In the face of rising and falling impact factors, even magazines in the scientific research community are rarely able to be neither humble nor overbearing. For example, "Energy & Environmental Science", which has been quite popular in recent years, uses increase and decrease The method of manuscripts (research leaders write reviews and editors control manuscripts) raised the impact factor to 22.118 within five years.

Regardless of its reputation, its successful model has been copied by many innovative journals.

First of all, Wu Bin looked at the general trend in the scientific research community, which is the "Nature Index"

This is an index created by Nature Publishing Group in 2014. The purpose is very simple. They will count the papers published in 68 internationally recognized first-class academic journals, and then use three counting methods to calculate the statistics.

In the [Country Outputs] page, Wu Bin can use the three statistical rankings of AC, FC and WFC to know which countries are scientific research experts this year.

The first is AC (Article Count). Simply put, for an article, no matter how many co-authors you have, as long as one of the authors belongs to a university or scientific research institution in a certain country, then this article will have the AC value of this country. +1

Next is FC (fractional count) fractional measurement. The contribution value of all authors in each article is divided into N parts. Each author will have a contribution percentage. Then the cumulative percentages of authors belonging to the same country are added up. Get the FC value of each country.

The last WFC (weighted fractional count) is called weighted fractional count, which is an improvement of the weighted fractional count. This is entirely because among the many articles sampled in the Naure Index survey, the fields of astronomy and astrophysics The articles are so exaggerated! It can be said that the number of articles far exceeds that of other fields.

Therefore, in order to balance the impact of each field, we simply directly multiplied the FC of the two fields with a weight coefficient of 0.2.

An index calculated in this way can be said to be completely objective.

"The United States is still the father..."

Looking at the list displayed on the computer, Wu Bin couldn't help but shake his head.

AC: 28032, FC: 18658.70, WFC: 16584.86

All three statistics ranked firmly...oh no, ranked first.

It is 2.5 times higher than that of China, which ranks second.

Yes, it is China that ranks second in the natural index.

AC: 9429, FC: 6695.66, WFC: 6308.33

All three data are well-deserved second place. In fact, Wu Bin did not expect this at all when he checked this data for the first time.

The third place is Germany, an absolute technological powerhouse in most eyes.

AC: 9035, FC: 4556.49, WFC: 3940.19

"It seems to be a bit higher than last year." Suddenly, a sense of national pride arose in Wu Bin's heart.

Although it is still several levels behind when it comes to fighting American imperialism, China is still the stable leader in the second scientific research country group.

The second place in Asia is Japan, ranked fifth.

AC: 4887, FC: 3123.13, WFC: 2877.27

It was twice as weak as the Hua Kingdom, which made Wu Bin feel happy.

After roughly browsing the top 20 countries, Wu Bin clicked on the link to the Huaguo label and came to Huaguo's General analysis page.