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

La actualidad del pensamiento de Mary E. Richmond en el Trabajo Social italiano

Hereinafter, an analysis of the contribution that Mary E. Richmond’s thought, as presented in her 1922 work What is Social Case Work?, may provide nowadays to Social Work. After placing her contribution in the Italian context, aspects of her work considered even now as fundamental in the construction of professional knowledge and action will be identified. Attention will be focused on those factors which have persisted and have permitted, if not always in an explicit way, the discipline to flow within the banks of the internal continuity of a research tradition. Among the many areas of reflection that the text offers, the ones that appear most relevant today will be focused upon, despite the challenges we are experiencing due to the contraction of resources and to the guidelines of social politics, e.g. the active position of the individual in the help process, the centrality of the person, confidence in change and the role habits play, active and transformative adaptation, encouragement in working with resources, and finally, connections between people, living conditions and the system of resources.En este artículo se analiza la aportación que el pensamiento de Mary Richmond, tal y como se presentó en su libro de 1922 ¿Qué es el trabajo social de caso?, sigue proporcionado al Trabajo Social actual. Tras situar su contribución en el contexto italiano, se apuntarán aquellos aspectos que aún hoy siguen siendo cruciales para la construcción del saber y la acción profesional, en un intento de centrar la atención en aquellos factores que han permanecido y permitido, no siempre explícitamente, que la disciplina haya discurrido por los cauces de continuidad interna de la propia tradición investigadora. De las numerosas sugerencias que emergen del estudio de esta obra, se han escogido las que siguen pareciendo significativas aún hoy, incluso frente a los desafíos que plantea la reducción de los recursos y las directrices de la política social: la posición activa del sujeto en el proceso de ayuda, la centralidad de la persona, la confianza en el cambio y en el papel de los hábitos, la adaptación activa y transformadora, la orientación promocional en el trabajo con los recursos y, por último, las conexiones entre las personas, las condiciones de vida y el sistema de recursos