Xueba's Sea of ​​Stars

Chapter 204 Impact Factors
Speaking of major events in the academic world in June, it must be that ISI will officially announce the impact factor of this year's SCI journals.

What is Impact Factor and why is it so important in academia?
In fact, it is very simple, because it can tell you with the most sufficient data and without any subjective factors, which country has stronger scientific and technological strength now!

As a member who has stepped into the academic world, Wu Bin is of course also very concerned about the announcement of the impact factor, because it allows him to fully understand the global and Huaguo's general scientific research situation last year.

When turning on the computer, Wu Bin couldn't help but think of the sentence that Professor Lin complained yesterday, "In the eyes of most people, our country is a technologically weak country."

But this can’t be blamed on ordinary people who don’t care about scientific research, because scientific research needs to go through several steps if it wants to enter daily life and become an ordinary object around you.

The first is the basic research that most scientists need to do. Cells, atoms, and materials are all these, and they represent the foundation of the technological building.

Then there is applied research, such as the graphene that Wu Bin is currently researching. Only after he has thoroughly studied the properties of the material can researchers in related fields think about how to apply it to themselves based on the basic properties of the material. in the field of research.

When the application is successful, there will be a factory to make it, and then it has entered the sight of ordinary people.

To give a simple example, the ballpoint pen is so common that it cannot be seen any more, and absolutely no one would regard it as a high-tech.

However, in fact, the pen oil of the ballpoint pen is very particular. The basic components include dyes, film-forming agents, solvents, dispersants and other additives.

Not to mention the small ball pen tip with extremely high technical content.

Why is the ballpoint pen called a ballpoint pen, and why does it not ensure that excess pen oil leaks out while writing? It is because the thickness of the bowl mouth of the ball base body where the small ballpoints are placed is only 0.4 mm, and it actually has to withstand when you write. A lot of pressure, if the material used is not strong enough, it will easily break.

And how to solve these problems?Rely on those basic science workers.

Therefore, it is a very long process from the research direction to the manufacture of a thing, and the finished product does not necessarily meet the "high-tech" that most people think of.

The reason why people feel that Huaguo's technology is weak is because the people of Huaguo have actually been oppressed by foreign powers to have enough to eat, and now they have become the "strongest developing country". It is still in basic research and even theory, and it will take a lot of time to really break out.

You must know that Huaguo is a country that completely missed the first and second industrial revolutions. In fact, there are many loopholes in the basic theory. It can only be described as incredible to catch up to this point.

Thinking of this, Wu Bin often thought of a sentence that Li Yan liked to make fun of when he swiped Weibo.

"The media uses their mouths to do scientific research, while scientists use their hands. It's clear at a glance who is more rhythmic."

Speaking of the impact factor, it is the most powerful data used to measure the success of basic research.

Because the results of basic research cannot be displayed directly as finished products, most of them are published in the form of papers.

So how do you know the quality of a paper?Just look at how many times it has been cited.

Those papers that have been cited hundreds of times must be good articles. There is no hype in it. Buying data, buying trolls, and serious ones are definitely cited by peers. Of course, there are also some A boutique submerged in water-filled articles.

The impact factor is the average number of citations of the journal articles.

In the face of the ups and downs of the impact factor, even the journals in the scientific research field are rarely able to be neither humble nor overbearing. For example, the very popular "Energy & Environmental Science (Energy and Environmental Science)" in recent years has increased and decreased the use of The method of drafting (the researcher writes a review, and the editor controls the manuscript) has raised the impact factor to 22.118 within five years.

Regardless of word-of-mouth, its successful model has been borrowed by many innovative journals anyway.

First of all, Wu Bin looked at the general trend in the scientific research community, which is the "Nature Index"

This is an index created by the "Nature" Publishing Group in 2014. The purpose is very simple. They will count the papers in the 68 internationally recognized first-class academic journals, and then use three counting methods to count.

On the [Country Outputs] page, Wu Bin can use AC, FC and WFC three statistics rankings to know which countries are young experts in scientific research this year.

The first is AC (Article Count). Simply put, for an article, no matter how many co-authors you have, as long as one of the authors belongs to a university or scientific research institution in a certain country, then this article will have the AC value of this country. +1
Then there is FC (fractional count) fractional measurement, which divides the contribution value of all authors in each article into N shares, and each author will have a contribution percentage, and then add up the percentages of authors belonging to the same country cumulatively. Get the FC value of each country.

The last WFC (weighted fractional count) is called weighted fractional count, which is an improvement of weighted fractional count. This is entirely because among the many articles sampled in the Naure Index survey, the fields of astronomy and astrophysics The articles are so exaggerated!It can be said that the number of articles far exceeds that of other fields.

Therefore, in order to balance the influence of each field, a weight factor of 0.2 was directly multiplied by the FC of the two fields.

An index calculated in this way can be said to be completely objective.

"America is still Dad..."

Looking at the list displayed on the computer, Wu Bin couldn't help but shake his head.

AC: 28032, FC: 18658.70, WFC: 16584.86
All three data are firmly ranked... oh no, it ranks first.

It is a full 2.5 times higher than the second-ranked Huaguo.

That's right, it is Huaguo that ranks No.2 in the natural index.
AC: 9429, FC: 6695.66, WFC: 6308.33
All three data are well-deserved No. 2. In fact, Wu Bin did not expect this when he first checked this data.

And No.3 is the absolute technological powerhouse in most eyes, Germany.

AC: 9035, FC: 4556.49, WFC: 3940.19
"It's a bit higher than last year, it seems." Suddenly, a sense of national pride rose in Wu Bin's heart.

Although it is still several levels behind to compete with the US emperor, Huaguo is still a stable leader in the second scientific research country group.

No.2 in Asia is Japan, ranking fifth.

AC: 4887, FC: 3123.13, WFC: 2877.27
It was twice as weak as Huaguo, which made Wu Bin very happy.

After roughly browsing the top 20 countries, Wu Bin clicked on the link on the Huaguo label and came to Huaguo's General Analysis page.

(End of this chapter)