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

Good morning! Memes and the visual economy of images in contemporary India

India is one of several developing nations – including many in Africa – where mobile phone use has grown exponentially since c. 2005, and where for many millions of people access to the internet is via smart phone, not computer. According to the Telephone Regulatory Authority in India, mobile phone ownership stands at an estimated 1.1 billion (in a population of 1.3 billion) as of 31 January 2017 and is growing all the time. While the federal government is exploring the use of mobile telephony to eliminate all cash transactions, I am interested in Indian people's use of mobile telephony to make and maintain new forms of sociality. I focus in particular on the ‘good morning' meme which, sent in its millions each morning across the country, threatens to break the mobile phone networks