Scholar’s Starry Sea

Speaking of the academic major event in June, it must be that ISI will officially announce the impact factor of this year's SCI journals.

What is an impact factor and why is it so important in academia?

It's actually very simple, because it can tell you with the most sufficient data and without any subjective factors, which country has the stronger scientific and technological strength now!

As a member of the academic world, Wu Bin is of course also very concerned about the announcement of the impact factor, because this allows him to understand the global and China's general scientific research situation last year.

When turning on the computer, Wu Bin couldn’t help but think of the sentence Professor Lin said yesterday, "my country is a country with weak technology in the eyes of most people."

But we can’t blame those An ordinary person who doesn't care about scientific research, because successful scientific research needs to go through several steps to enter daily life and become an ordinary object around you.

First of all, the basic research that most scientists need to do. Cells, atoms, materials, these all are, they represent the foundation of the science and technology building.

Then comes the application research, such as Wu Bin’s current research on graphene. Only when he thoroughly researches the properties of the material, can researchers in related fields be able to base the basic properties of the material. Think about how to apply it to their own research fields.

When the application is successful, there will be factories to make it, and then it enters the sight of ordinary people.

To give a simple example, a ballpoint pen is so common that it can no longer be common, and absolutely no one will regard it as a high-tech.

In fact, the pen oil of ballpoint pens is very particular. The basic ingredients include dyes, film formers, solvents, dispersants and other additives.

Not to mention the extremely high-tech nib bead.

Why is the ball-point pen called a ball-point pen, and why is it not guaranteed that the extra pen oil will leak out while writing the characters, because the thickness of the bowl of the ball seat body where the small ball is placed is only 0.4 mm. It actually has to withstand a lot of pressure when you write. If the material used is not strong enough, it will easily break.

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

So it is a very long process to say that a thing has a research direction to be manufactured, and the finished product does not necessarily meet the high-tech "high-tech" in most people's minds.

The reason why people think that China’s technology is weak is because the people of China have actually gone from being bullied by foreign powers to having their food, and now they have become the "strongest developing country". In fact, there are several decades, many things They are still in basic research and even theory, and it will take a lot of time to really break out.

We must know that China is a country that completely missed the first and second industrial revolutions. There are actually many loopholes in the basic theory. It can only be described as inconceivable to follow this step.

Thinking of this, Wu Bin often thinks of Li Yan's words that he especially likes to spit on Weibo.

"The media use their mouths to do scientific research, while scientists use their hands, who is more capable of rhythm at a glance."

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

Because the results of basic research cannot be directly displayed 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 the number of citations.

Those papers that have been cited hundreds or thousands of times are definitely good articles. There is no hype in them. Buying data, buying naval forces, those who are serious are the peers. Quoting, of course, there are also some fine works that have been submerged in irrigation articles.

The impact factor is the average number of citations of this journal article.

In the face of the ups and downs of impact factors, even the journals in the scientific research community are rarely able to be neither humble nor overbearing, just like the very hot "Environmental Science (Energy and Environmental Science)" in recent years. The impact factor was raised to 22.118 in five years by using the method of adding and subtracting manuscripts (research leaders write reviews and editors control manuscripts).

Regardless of its reputation, its successful model has been borrowed by many innovative journals anyway.

First of all, what Wu Bin looks at is the general trend of the scientific research community, that is, "NatureIndex"

This is a report developed by the "Nature" Publishing Group in 2014. The purpose of the index is very simple. They will count the papers in 68 internationally recognized first-class academic journals, and then count them through three counting methods.

On this page of [Country Outputs], Wu Bin can know which countries are small scientific research experts this year through the three statistical rankings of AC, FC and WFC.

The first is AC (ArticleCount). Simply put, for an article, no matter how many trucks of co-authors you have, as long as there is an author belonging to a university or scientific research institution in a certain country, then this article is Let the AC value of this country +1

Followed by the FC (fractionalcount) score measurement, the contribution value of all authors in each article is divided into N parts, and each author will have a contribution percentage, and then Add up the percentages of authors belonging to the same country to get the FC value of each country.

The final WFC (wightedfractionalcount) is called weighted fractional count, which is an improvement to weigh the number of fractional vehicles. This is entirely because of the many articles in the NaureIndex survey and sampling, astronomy and celestial Physics The articles in these two fields are too exaggerated! It can be said that it far exceeds the number of articles in other fields.

So in order to balance the influence of various fields, I simply and rudely multiplied the FC of the two fields with a weighting coefficient of 0.2.

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

"America is still father..."

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

AC: 28032, FC: 18658.70, WFC: 16584.86

All three items are stable...Oh no, it ranks first.

It is 2.5 times higher than the second-ranked China.

Yes, it is China that ranks second in the natural index,

AC: 9429, FC: 6695.66, WFC: 6308.33

Three data Both are well-deserved second place, which actually didn't expect when Wu Bin first checked this data.

And the third place is the absolute technological power in most eyes, Germany.

AC: 9035, FC: 4556.49, WFC: 3940.19

"It seems to be a bit higher than last year." In a flash, Wu Bin felt a sense of national pride in his heart. rising.

Although it is still several levels short of fighting with the US, China is still a stable leader in the second scientific research country group.

The second place in Asia is Japan, which ranks fifth.

AC: 4887, FC: 3123.13, WFC: 2877.27

It is twice as weak as China, which makes Wu Bin very pleased in one's mind.

After reading about the top 20 countries, Wu Bin clicked on the link of the China tab and came to China's General analysis page.