Abstracto
-
Ladies & gentlemen,
I am writing this open letter to you, the people who produce the Impact Factor reports, in good will and because I believe you can improve it.
I first learned about citation as “indication of scientific impact” in the short articles that Eugene Garfield used to publish in the Current Contents booklets back in the 1980’s, when I was a student. There he mentioned the idea of “core journals”, i.e. those that were allegedly more important because they were more cited; this idea may be one answer to the question: “How can I, as a librarian who knows nothing about Physics or Chemistry, decide which journal subscriptions to buy with my limited budget?”