Peer Review

 

All the articles listed here were peer reviewed before they were published. Peer review is the process of subjecting an author's research to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the same field. It is difficult for authors and researchers, whether individually or in a team, to spot every mistake or flaw in a complicated piece of work. This is not necessarily a reflection on those concerned, but because with a new and perhaps eclectic subject, an opportunity for improvement may be more obvious to someone with special expertise or who simply looks at it with a fresh eye. Therefore, showing work to others increases the probability that weaknesses will be identified and improved. For both grant-funding and publication in a scholarly journal, it is also normally a requirement that the subject is both novel and substantial. Peer review is generally considered essential to academic quality.

 

 

Impact Fator

 

The Impact factor was devised by Eugene Garfield, the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information, now part of Thomson, a large worldwide US-based publisher. Impact factors are calculated each year by the Institute for Scientific Information for those journals which it indexes, and the factors and indices are published in Journal Citation Reports.

Though the impact factor was originally intended as an objective measure of the reputability of a journal (Garfield), it is now being increasingly applied to measure the productivity of scientists. The way it is customarily used is to examine the impact factors of the journals in which the scientist's articles have been published. This has obvious appeal for an academic administrator who knows neither the subject nor the journals.