August | 2009 | Lonely Joe Parker

(originally posted on Kitserve.org.uk)

Recently, I’ve taken on more consulting work outside my own immediate area. http://www.eigenfactor.org, a free impact factor tool, has been incredibly handy. Here’s why.

Getting to grips (well on some level, at least) with a new system is a bit exciting and not a little empowering, too – like the first time you really understood crystalization as a kid (remember those copper sulphate crystals in the jar?)

The problem is that journals always fall into four categories in my book;

Top level ones like Science, Nature, PLoS and PNAS,
Reviews and stuff that are usually a good place to start,
Key articles in specialist journals, and
Crapola which you don’t need to bother with (to start with, at least).

The trouble is, while 1, 2, and 4 pretty much find themselves, working out which journals to look in for the specialist stuff when you start in a new field is pretty hard. For instance, the Journal of General Virology, Journal of Virology, and Virology all deal, obviously, with viruses and their biology… but which is the more authoritative?

The Impact Factor

If you’ve trained as a scientist, you’re probably sagely muttering ‘impact factor’. If you’ve ever worked as one you’re probably screaming it.

So what is this ‘impact factor’? Sounds like something to do with ballistics. Basically it’s a measure of the amount of influence a given published scientific article has on other articles. Since an article’s authors reference (or ‘cite’) other articles from all kinds of journals and books for background information and to support their own assertions, it follows that an article considered to be important to professionals in a field will be cited more frequently than an irrelevant one.

So good articles are cited more frequently. That helps us find those (both http://pubmed.org and http://scholar.google.com will tell you how many times a given article has been cited). And it’s a fairly simple matter to aggregate the mean number of citations per article in a particular journal and express that as a ratio or percentile of others in its field (you can also apply the same process to deciding whether or not to hire a particular scientist if you’re an institution or funding body – a nasty and growing trend which explains the screaming mentioned above…)

Use your judgement

There is a whole set of complex arguments about the best way to do that, and I won’t go into them here, not least because in my opinion at the end of the day you should always use your own good professional judgement when evaluating an article’s importance – no impact factor can fully do that for you. Ask yourself:

Do I actually know enough about the area yet to work out in general what the hell this article means, let alone if it’s any good?
If the citations seem particularly high (or low) for this journal/authors/general quality of paper, am I missing something?

If the answer to the first question is ‘no’ you’d better go off and read a few more reviews…

Eigenfactor

Anyway, why am I boning eigenfactor.org so hard at the moment? Well, a couple of reasons really:

It’s free
It has good coverage, and
A great search interface, which is simple to use.

There are a few other useful things about their interface and data filtering, but for me those are the three main reasons. The ‘free’ thing’s great, obviously. But I really like the coverage they have and search interface because it quickly lets me find my way into a subject – when you start typing a journal or discipline into the box it autocompletes for you really smoothly. Ace huh?

Applying this to our virology journals, we find that their impact factors differ quite widely:

J. Gen. Virol. – 3.092
J. Virol. – 5.332
Virology – 3.765

So the Journal of Virology is the winner! Cool. Now I’m off to bone up on vif gene inactivation…

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STEP017 – released 28/07/2010
Buy now: iTunes | eMusic | Amazon | Spotify

“A split release of jaunty confidence and empathy. It’s worth buying a turntable just to hear this.”
Matt Golding, The Fly
“intriguing melodies and playful composition… highly alluring.”
Track Of The Day 15/12/09, Q Magazine
“Gentle finger picked guitar and stream of conscious lyrics.. like a late night busker serenading the drunks staggering their way home… Get it for the Indie kid in your life.”
Singles Round-up 14/12/09, Clash Music
“a strange, yet fantastic collaboration”
Will Slater, The 405

Itinerant bum, romantic, and songwriting-genius-in-rags Lonely Joe Parker stumbled on a brilliant idea when he made it back to the UK last year, fresh from a busking tour of the eastern US seaboard. A planned tour following the Obama campaign trail had threatened to derail when a robbery in Miami left him penniless with 1000 miles to home.

But down on his luck amid the squalour and splendour of an American election, he sat down with a $20 pawnshop guitar and wrote a new clutch of songs inspired by his surroundings. Motivated by the chink of change in commuters’ pockets, he dug deep into americana, conceieving a twisted soundtrack to his predicament that took Tom Waits-ian observation and St. Vincent or Feist’s sonic vision, blended with a streets-eye view of the USA. The songs earnt their creator enough change to make it up to NYC, where gigs in the East Village and Williamsburg followed.

Back in the UK he began to wonder why the songs that had earnt his own keep couldn’t help others too. Hitting the buffers in the docklands of his native Southampton, he ran into guitarist and songsmith Jackie Paper – better known as David Miatt – himself taking time to decompress with a raft of misfit songs written following a hectic six months with his band Thomas Tantrum. Critical acclaim had seen them catapulted from rehearsing in a garage by the docks to the Reading, Bestival, SGP and Latitude festivals and national radio appearances (including BBC1 and 6Music), but now winter had bitten and an older, folkier impulse led him to pen a book of wistful, almost melancholic songs that didn’t fit in with his day-job-band’s indie-pop template, referencing Elliot Smith and Nick Drake more often than YYY or the Pixies.

Whilst browsing for vintage Lemonheads in their local Oxfam Music Store, the two hit on the idea of a split EP to shamelessly showcase their songs while raising money and awareness for Oxfam Music. It seemed deceptively simple: do a record on tick, release it through the UK’s network of Oxfam stores specializing in vinyl (touring them to promote the release), get new punters into the stores themselves (essentially great local indie record shops that happen to be benefit empowering development projects worldwide) and walk off with the memories while letting Oxfam pocket all the filthy money.

Six months later, after many long hours waiting outside friends’ studios (Furnace, The Ranch) for spare time, instruments and beds to sleep on, these six songs are the fruit of that collaboration. Friends in Modernaire, Peter Lyons Band, The Moulettes and Moneytree also perform, while the record was mastered by Thomas Tantrum drummer Dave Wade-Brown. Co-operative indie label Sotones release the EP, with original artwork commissioned from local illustrator Billy Mather.

Tracklisting:

1. Brooklyn
2. Shanty
3. Raining
4. All The Wine
5. Natural History
6. Down Among the Dead Men

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