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Published online 20 October 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.1169
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Is physics better than biology?
Citation statistics now comparable across disciplines.
Is the physics department at your university performing better than the biology department? Answering such questions objectively has been hard, because citation statistics and other bibliometric indicators can't be directly compared across disciplines. But now a team in Italy has found a way to do just that.
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As I read the, "Is physics better than biology?" report. I observe a continueation of a missing factor: The "god" factor! For if there is a god! All science data, is in fact spam. Part of the "god" factor: I CORINTHIANS 3:18. Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise. 3:19 For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness. 3:20 And again, The Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain. In all fairness to the accuracy of the whole picture: having run this artical; should not Nature News, run a second comparison article: "Is science better than Scripture".
Is scripture better than any other Scripture, say, the Mahabharata? Spare us from such nonsense.
I have just been to the PNAS website to try to find this article, but can't find it. Using the doi number supplied here does not return it either (doi is said to be invalid). Any suggestions as to how to find this article?
Garbage in garbage out! A piece of garbage is still a piece of garbage no matter how you "normalize" it and transform it. Impact Factor (IF) is just such a piece of garbage because it actually takes negative citation into account of a presumably positive impact and includes many citations for the spinning publication rather than the actual discovery. Thus, no matter how hard you will "normalize" it, the harsh reality is that Hwang's retracted stem cell research paper still performs much better than most other papers in the same category. Those high-retraction journals (such as Science, Nature, PNAS and Cell which contributed 18% retractions recorded in the PubMed) still have some unusually high IFs than those low-retraction journals. Commercial magazines (which publish much non-original-research-but-still-citable information) still out-perform those scholar journals (which publish just the original research reports). All of these ABNORMATY are due to the mere fact that IF is a fundamentally flawed factor in assessing the positive impact of valid great discovery as historically reflected for example by their recognition with a Nobel Prize. Thus, to return a NORMAL environment to science so that scientists are working for making discovery but not chasing for impact factor, it is necessary to eliminate IF entirely. We had a golden era of achieving the greatest discoveries in a time period before the introduction of IF. We are having a much corrupted scientific society after the wide-spread use of IF. Should we continue the bad influence of IF or should we move into an IF-free environment so that scientists think only first to make a discovery and last any impact factor. By the way, the original report for the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of GFP was published in an "obscure" journal called J. Cell. Comp. Physiol. and so far it have received just 385 citations (about 8 citations per year since 1962). Shi V. Liu (SVL@logibio.com; http://im1.biz; http://blog.sina.com.cn/im1 )
Whatever methods or devices are evolved, it is sure that some fields can not be judged on the basis of IFs or various indices. Falling a prey to this IF game is going to kill the main spirit of science. People by any hook or crook try to make their work more catchy and attractive to be acceptable to the desired journals of high IF without really bothering about the essence of research. The condition is more damaging in developing countries where most scientists doing basic/ classical sciences (Krell, F. T. (2002) Nature 415, 957) find themselves alienated and demoralised.Basic sciences have been largely discouraged with usually low impact assigned to their journals. This act can be detrimental as the foundation studies are very crucial in any field. As a result a scientist supposedly working on any specialized title chooses to take up more wider and shallow topic to have it published in journal of wider readership thus high impact factor. The super specialized journals (of basic sciences) in this regard receive the blow with less and less scientists interested in publishing. Therefore, the only criteria to evaluate a scientific research should be that it should come from a high impact journal of the corresponding field as evaluated by the experts of that field. Evaluating all disciplines with the same yardstick is not justified and will have serious consequences in years to come.
Why in heavens earth would number of citations for an individuals sharing of research results be important at all except to those that believe the number of ticks beside the paper/shared information indicates some form of value other than the actual shared results..I understand criticism is vital in the realm of science and proofs are done to test results as published..Statistics is a numbers game remember....And numbers are simply an accepted reference point to use in understanding--which i allways thought science was about--So to give power to something like number of citations as a hiring tool speaks volumes of administration priorites ...which of course are responsible for providing facilities to the research community...ah!!The tao is true...Regards Marty Wolf
About the h-index: Either I don't get it or it's one of the dumbest ways of measuring scientific achievement. What would the h-index of Wright Brothers be? Or that of Carl Benz? About the impact factor. It may be a measure of the immediate impact of a journal since it includes only citations for the past two years, but that could include a lot of "bubble gum" papers as well. A truly valuable paper would get cites for many years, but that wouldn't show up in the IF. There are lots of problems if one considers just raw citation data. Self-citations are the most obvious and can be corrected for. But what about "ole-boy-network" citations, that is mutual citations of a small subgroup of people within a discipline? Perhaps this too can be corrected for by counting not the total number of cites, but the total number of **individuals** that cite a given scientist, normalized somehow to the total number of people involved in similar research. Just as "some animals are more equal than others" some cites are more equal than others. I'd rather get 1 cite by Professor BigShot than 10 cites by Professor Nobody. This is essentially the idea used in Google when they rank the relative importance of the web pages when you do a search, the so-called PageRank. Roughly, if a webpage that has a link to your webpage has a high PageRank, then its contribution to your PageRank is proportionately higher. In a similar spirit, if someone who cites your work is himself/herself a highly cited scientist, then that cite should count proportionately higher than a cite you receive from a poorly cited fellow. After a few iterations, this scheme would converge to stable values for each researcher. Considering the immense success of the Google in sorting the search results, I would think it could be a scheme well worth considering.
I just don't find any meaning in having questions like the subject of this letter. Biology is needed for understanding why the living beings including humans are behaving the way they do and to upgrade our life and Physics is needed for the understanding why Nature behaves in a way as it does? So in order to understand the nature including the nature of living systems Physics and Biology should go hand in hand. At the end this is what the field Biophysics implies.
Citations are rewarding, a nice "game", but perhaps we should remind that science is not democratic. The validity of a scientific research cannot be decided by the majority (i.e. a lot of citations). Surely Ptolemy and Aristotle were the "best cited" authors at the time of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, but today we know that the reality is different to what the majority of people thought. What about the phlogiston? It obtained high citations in the XVII century, but today... who care about it? We can continue with a very long list of similar cases and books dealing with history of science are full of such stories. But it appears that we learned nothing or very little...
Dear Maxine, I did the DOI search in PNAS today but still got the message "Your search criteria matched no articles". Have you reported your finding to PNAS before? If so I am surprised how non-responsive PNAS is./// Now the only way that you may get that PNAS "in press" paper is to call or email Phillip Ball, the author of this news. If you cannot get that paper even by this means, then you should ask the author how could s/he write a news on that PNAS "publication"?/// I hope that there is no hoax around here even though the question asked by this News is apparently an very inappropriate one./// Shi V. Liu (SVL@logibio.com; http://im1.biz/IF.htm)
The paper was scheduled to appear in PNAS online Early Edition during the week 20-24 October. Due unexpectedly heavy workload, there has been a delay. The paper is now scheduled to appear online on November 4. A preprint version can in any case found here: http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.0974
Thanks! Claudio. But I am confused about its publishing location. You gave a citation of "http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.0974" which is not PNAS per se but in the abstract shown in that arxiv location it was stated "accepted for publication in Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA)? So where will it be published or DOUBLE-published? Have you informed of Nature directly about this change and, if so, why Nature has not changed a wrong citation in its news for this article. ///Shi V. Liu (SVL@logibio.com; http://im1.biz/IF.htm)
The paper has finally been published in the online early edition of PNAS http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/10/30/0806977105 The doi identifier now works. The paper has not been published twice: arxiv is just an online repository for preprints.
As an middle-aged to older gent with earned doctorates in physics with a heavy emphasis on materials science and another in theology; I find religious flaming quite offensive. I think the two should be treated separately. But that's just one opinion. How that first post has survived so long must be due to its controversial nature. There are appropriate forums for such diatribes but how one can conclude scientific evidence is merely spam needs to be reconsidered. Did not the Apostle Paul become all things to all people so that he might win some over to his point of view. Such principles seem lost on fundis of major religions. One of Einstein's contemporaries name Lematrie sought to reconcile science and religion over several decades. In the end he concluded the two were best to be treated separately. A theory in science in not to be equated with the vernacular definition of theory. Much of comparing physics and biology might be treated in the same way though I do see the correlation. Of course you'll be hard-pressed to find many with a stronger belief in inter-disciplinary scientific and engineering efforts. Bigger problems exist when labs and researchers interpret jargon, rules, decorum and the like operate under a variety of cultural differences.
I am surprised to read the biased opinion of so called scientists accross the world. Why you should compare Biology with Physics? Why not with Geology with rest of Science subjects. Impact factor hungry Biology community should not forget the pioneer Science contribution of Geologists. Development of modern civilisation has a major role of Geosciences. Geologists are working silently in remote corners of the world to know the facts of the Earth but they have less time to write and publish. The challange of Earthquake prediction funding and research was negated by the Physicists and Biologists by not promoting the Geosciences in developing countries.In difficult terrain the groundwater exploration is done by earth scientists by selecting the sites using satellite data and other geophysical tools, when the ground water is extracted the credit is taken by Engineers and Administrators. References: 1.Mukherjee, S. (2006). Earthquake Prediction. Published by Brill Academic Publishers Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden (The Netherlands) & Boston (USA). ISBN-10: 90 6764 450 1 and ISBN-13 (i) 978 9067644 50 www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=10&mcid=8&pid=25855 Cited in Science Journal on 9th March 2007. http://www.sciencemag.org/books/ 2.Sensors 2008, 8, 7736-7752; DOI: 10.3390/s8127736 3.Return of Kosi river induced by Tibet earthquake . Nature Precedings <http://hdl.handle.net/10101/npre.2008.2278.1> (2008) 4.Role of Satellite Sensors in Groundwater Exploration. Sensors Journal 2008, 8 pp 2006-2017 Prof.S.Mukherjee Professor of Geology School of Environmental Sciences Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi-110067 INDIA dr.saumitramukherjee@usa.net
When I first open this discussion I did so on a 'What non-sense, what is this doing in NATURE!?' basis. Popularity and relevance in terms of what is trendy and hence is widely read and sought is an important aspect of thinking, it is social acheivement through cleverness. The article crystallized something that had intuitively been bugging me with out reaching rational level. Cleverness certainly is not wisdom, and what is widely acclaimed is not necessarily what is of longterm importance. You see I belong to a discipline that is generally not cited much by others, anthropology, and one of it's fields that tries hardest to be very real science, archaeology. NATURE doesn't even publish archaeology articles...but who can claim with much credibility that no factor unites cross-disciplinary more than 'what is the human factor?'? Relative relevance also is something that does, must, change through time. NATURE's biases to the contrary as much as my own initial reaction, this topic is something good to think on. Thanks.