What Makes a Publisher Important?
Sara Rushinek,
Ubiquity,
May 13, 2003
I like the direction this article heads, but I'm not so sure CRLFpublishers will, if they follow its implications to their logical CRLFconclusion. The article proposes, in brief, that an article may be CRLFmeasured for importance by "the relative number of CRLFcitations of a search engine as the evaluation criteria." By CRLFimplication, a journal that accumulates a greater aggregate CRLFscore is probably better than one with fewer links. Of course, CRLFthis method ignores those journals locked away in proprietary CRLFdatabases (but they'r enever found, or read, anyway, so it may CRLFnot matter). More to the point, the system is democratic to a CRLFfault: one person's link to a publication is given as much weight CRLFas the next's. This makes the most important publication of our CRLFtime the "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" parody site, or some CRLFsuch thing. But hey. Maybe it was the most important publication. CRLFNow for the logical implication: it is likely that some publications CRLFwill score less well than some personal websites. If I test Google CRLFwith link:www.downes.ca I get 654 hits. Try the same test for the CRLFJournal of Distance Education - CRLFlink:http://www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/JDE/ - and I get 100 hits. So - CRLFwhere should I publish my next paper? The answer is obvious - CRLFon my own website, where it is six times more likely to be read. CRLFYeah! But this makes a bit of a mash of the idea of 'superior CRLFpublications' - doesn't it?
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