It's flame bait alright and I'm swallowing it hook, line and sinker, just as last time These guys over there just always manage to press all my buttons

So what's going on? The blog of the Association for Scholarly Publishing seems to be in PLoS One bashing mode these days. This time with a post about the new Impact Factor (IF) for PLoS One. There has already been quite some discussion going on away from the original post (as nobody with scientific credentials seems to be inclined to post comments there anymore). The two people reading my blog (hi Mom! ) know my position on IFs. Those who don't can read here or here. The central sentence of the piece over at the Scholarly Kitchen is actually a question: Asking this question can entail a few things:

1. The author doesn't know how left-skewed data affect the arithmetic mean (see any statistics textbook).
2. The author doesn't know how the IF is 'calculated' (see links above).
3. The author doesn't know that there is little/no correlation between pre-publication selection and IF (BMJ 1997).
4. The author does know all this, but thinks his readers don't know any of the above.

Given that the author after his question goes on to speculate wildly about some unrelated ramblings having little or nothing to do with the real world of scientific publishing in general or with PLoS One in particular, it seems that 1-3 seem the most obvious candidates. If the author were aware of any one of these facts, he would not go on for several paragraphs on some completely unrelated musings, but register the IF and shrug - which is what any sensible person with the least amount of knowledge of the area would do. Which, probably not coincidentally, is exactly what PLoS intends to do, rather than "launching PLoS TWO" as the author suggests, in a more blatant display of incompetence in all matters scholarly publishing than the silly question (and indeed the entire post) already constitutes.


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