The Impact Factor Fetishism

"One of the most popular indicators is the Impact Factor. This paper examines the coming into being of this highly influential figure. It is the offspring of Eugene Garfield’s experimentation with the huge amounts of data available at his Institute for Scientific Information and the result of a number of attempts to find appropriate measurements for the success ('impact') of articles and journals. The completely inductive procedure was initially adjusted by examining the data thoughtfully and by consulting with experts from different scientific disciplines. Later, its calculation modes were imposed on other disciplines without further consideration. The paper demonstrates in detail the inopportune consequences of this, in particular for sociology. Neither the definition of disciplines, nor the selection of journals for the Web of Science/Social Science Citation Index follows any comprehensible rationale. The procedures for calculating the impact factor are inappropriate. Despite its obvious unsuitability, the impact factor is used by editors of sociological journals for marketing and impression management purposes. Fetishism!" (author's abstract

A Transatlantic History of the Social Sciences

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. From the beginning of the twentieth century, scientific and social scientific research has been characterised by intellectual exchange between Europe and the US. The establishment of the Third Reich ensured that, from the German speaking world, at least, this became a one-way traffic. In this book Christian Fleck explores the invention of empirical social research, which by 1950 had become the binding norm of international scholarship, and he analyses the contribution of German refugee social scientists to its establishment. The major names are here, from Adorno and Horkheimer to Hirshman and Lazarsfeld, but at the heart of the book is a unique collective biography based on original data from more than 800 German-speaking social scientists. Published in German in 2008 to great acclaim, Fleck's important study of the transatlantic enrichment of the social sciences is now available in a revised English-language edition

'No brains, no initiative, no collaboration' - the Austrian case

"Established formally in 1950, the Austrian Society of Sociology did not really exist during its first decade, though at the end of the 1950s one man entered the International Sociological Association under the guise of the Austrian Society of Sociology. In the middle of the 1960s, when the government began a reform of the university system, sociology was established as a full programme and the Society was resuscitated. At the end of the 1960s, the worldwide student movement spilled over into Austria, and self-proclaimed revolutionaries came to power. From the mid-1970s the Society became a more or less normal association: it published a journal and a newsletter, and organized annual conferences and sections for academic discussion. The time-lag between the intellectual beginnings of sociology and the establishment of the Society is remarkable. The Society does not function as a professional organization. Its influence on the university curriculum and the recruitment policies of departments has been weak, the participation of its members is poor, and its international standing is negligible. All in all, the history of the Society seems to confirm what the ex-Austrian Paul F. Lazarsfeld wrote in 1959 about the Austrian situation: 'no brains, no initiative, no collaboration'." (author's abstract

Heufelder: Argentinischer Krösus

Book review of:  Heufelder, Jeanette Erazo. 2017. Der argentinische Krösus. Kleine Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Frankfurter Schule (The Argentine Croesus: Short Economic History of the Frankfurt School). Berlin: Berenberg Verlag.205 pp.ISBN 978-3-946334-16-3,Price: € 24,0

A Transatlantic History of the Social Sciences

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. From the beginning of the twentieth century, scientific and social scientific research has been characterised by intellectual exchange between Europe and the US. The establishment of the Third Reich ensured that, from the German speaking world, at least, this became a one-way traffic. In this book Christian Fleck explores the invention of empirical social research, which by 1950 had become the binding norm of international scholarship, and he analyses the contribution of German refugee social scientists to its establishment. The major names are here, from Adorno and Horkheimer to Hirshman and Lazarsfeld, but at the heart of the book is a unique collective biography based on original data from more than 800 German-speaking social scientists. Published in German in 2008 to great acclaim, Fleck's important study of the transatlantic enrichment of the social sciences is now available in a revised English-language edition