Emerging Alternatives to the Impact Factor

Purpose: The authors document the proliferating range of alternatives to the impact factor that have arisen within the past five years, coincident with the increased prominence of open access publishing. Methodology/Approach: This paper offers an overview of the history of the impact factor as a measure for scholarly merit; a summary of frequent criticisms of the impact factor’s calculation and usage; and a framework for understanding some of the leading alternatives to the impact factor. Findings: This paper identifies five categories of alternatives to the impact factor: a. Measures that build upon the same data that informs the impact factor. b. Measures that refine impact factor data with “page rank” indices that weight electronic resources or Web sites through the number of resources that link to them. c. Measures of article downloads and other usage factors. d. Recommender systems, in which individual scholars rate the value of articles and a group’s evaluations pool together collectively. e. Ambitious measures that attempt to encompass the interactions and influence of all inputs in the scholarly communications system. Value of Paper: Librarians can utilize the measures described in this paper to support more robust collection development than is possible through reliance on the impact factor alone

Challenging the print paradigm: web-powered scholarship is setto advance the creation and distribution of research

Our containers for scholarly works – papers, monographs, PDFs – are anachronistic. Marcus A. Banks argues the Web is flexible enough to facilitate far more opportunities for scholarship in a way that print could never do. A print piece is necessarily reductive, while Web-oriented scholarship can be as capacious as required. He highlights three innovations in particular that are set to transform the scholarly environment: data papers, scholarly HTML and sophisticated data mining tools like Content Mine

How the Success of Open Access Publishing Can Stimulate Improved Access to Grey Literature

With a focus on biomedicine and public health, this paper will demonstrate that the emerging success of open access publishing provides a model for improved access to grey literature. It will describe pioneering efforts to provide access to grey literature, and recommend ways to build upon these initiatives. Finally, it will argue that the evolution of electronic scholarship will eventually collapse the distinction between grey and non-grey literature

The excitement of Google Scholar, the worry of Google Print

In late 2004 Google announced two major projects, the unveiling of Google Scholar and a major expansion of the Google Print digitization program. Both projects have generated discussion within the library and research communities, and Google Print has received significant media attention. This commentary describes exciting educational possibilities stimulated by Google Scholar, and argues for caution regarding the Google Print project

Towards a Continuum of Scholarship: The Eventual Collapse of the Distinction between Grey and Non-Grey Literature

Abstract (from University of Arizona Campus Repository) This paper argues that the distinction between grey and non-grey (or white) literature will become less relevant over time, as online discovery options proliferate. In the meantime, the political success of the open access publishing movement has valuable lessons for proponents of increasing access to grey literature

Emerging Alternatives to the Impact Factor

Purpose: The authors document the proliferating range of alternatives to the impact factor that have arisen within the past five years, coincident with the increased prominence of open access publishing. Methodology/Approach: This paper offers an overview of the history of the impact factor as a measure for scholarly merit; a summary of frequent criticisms of the impact factor’s calculation and usage; and a framework for understanding some of the leading alternatives to the impact factor. Findings: This paper identifies five categories of alternatives to the impact factor: a. Measures that build upon the same data that informs the impact factor. b. Measures that refine impact factor data with “page rank” indices that weight electronic resources or Web sites through the number of resources that link to them. c. Measures of article downloads and other usage factors. d. Recommender systems, in which individual scholars rate the value of articles and a group’s evaluations pool together collectively. e. Ambitious measures that attempt to encompass the interactions and influence of all inputs in the scholarly communications system. Value of Paper: Librarians can utilize the measures described in this paper to support more robust collection development than is possible through reliance on the impact factor alone

Light-Cone Formulation of Super D2-Brane

The light-cone Hamiltonian approach is applied to the super D2-brane, and the equivalent area--preserving and U(1) gauge-invariant effective Lagrangian, which is quadratic in the U(1) gauge field, is derived. The latter is recognised to be that of the three-dimensional U(1) gauge theory, interacting with matter supermultiplets, in a special external induced supergravity metric and the gravitino field, depending on matter fields. The duality between this theory and 11d supermembrane theory is demonstrated in the light-cone gauge.Comment: Version accepted for publication in Phys.Lett.B, Latex, 12 page

Meta-Stable Supersymmetry Breaking in a Cooling Universe

We look at the recently proposed idea that susy breaking can be accomplished in a meta-stable vacuum. In the context of one of the simplest models (the Seiberg-dual of super-QCD), we address the following question: if we look at this theory as it cools from high temperature, is it at all possible that we can end up in a susy-breaking meta-stable vacuum? To get an idea about the answer, we look at the free energy of the system at high temperature. We conclude that the phase-structure of the free-energy as the temperature drops, is indeed such that there is a second order phase transition in the direction of the non-susy vacuum at a finite $T=T_c^Q$. On the other hand, the potential barrier in the direction of the susy vacuum is there all the way till $T \sim 0$.Comment: writing full author name