Impact Factor in Brazil

[Michel J. Menou]

Since not everybody on the list might be concerned with the use of
citations and IF in research evaluation in countries and fields which do
not belong to the big league, I'd  rather refer to the work of the late
Mike Moravcsick and follow up efforts as reflected in the following
publications:

Moravcsik, M. J., (ed.).  "Strengthening the coverage of
Third World Science. The bibliographic indicators of the Third
World's contribution to science. Deliberations, conclusions and
initiatives of an ad-hoc international task force for assessing the
scientific output of the Third World. Eugene, OR., Institute of
Theoretical Science, University of Oregon, 1986.

Arvanitis, Rigas; Gaillard, Jacques, (eds.). Les indicateurs de science
pour les pays en developpement. Science indicators for developing
countries. Proceedings of the International conference on science
indicators for developing countries;  Paris, 15-19 October 1990. Paris,
ORSTOM Editions, 1992.

The leap on the issue of imperialism simply referred to the fact that when
a measure is built on the basis of the achievements, needs and choices of
the more powerful, applying it indiscriminately to all others, including
the less served, is an imposition.
This is why the production of local resources is so important. A good
example is SciELO (www.scielo.br)

At 15:38 09/09/00 -0400, Gene Garfield wrote:

>Here is the list of 17 journals from Brazil covered in the 1999 Journal
>Citation Reports. But I don't quite understand its relevance to the
>comments that follow. In general, the more local low impact  journals that
>are included in the calculation of impact, the lower will be the overall
>impact of that country's impact. snip
Sure. Thus Botswana will lag far behind Norway, even in Forestry. So what?
Do they play in the same league? Do they have the same individual
objectives and social role? If at least country rankings would be corrected
on the basis of the number of active scientists, with some coefficient for
their budgets.

>snip

Michel

PS By the way, it is fair to mention that ISI supported part of the
activities undertaken by the task force assembled by Mike Moravcsik. We
even had a party at Gene's place.