During the week I have learnt a lot of new information, e.g. how to select a research journal and paper, to find an “impact factor”, to use Google Academia etc. Further I will focus on it more deeply.
To select a relevant journal for media technology research I had to use Web of Science database. With Web of Science one can easily find high-impact articles, discover relevant results in related fields and emerging trends to do a good research. Every journal, which is included in Web of Science, has met the high standards of an objective evaluation process. One can find the “impact factor” of the journal not only on the Web of Science but on the journal’s web page.
I know that the “impact factor” (IF) of an academic journal shows the frequency with which the journal's articles are cited in the scientific literature. And it’s obviously used to compare different journals within a particular field. The IF of the selected journal (Communication Research) for 2011 is 2.014
If one wants to calculate the IF, it's possible to apply the following method:
A is the number of times articles published in 2009 and 2010 were cited by indexed journals during 2011.
B is the total number of "citable items" (articles, reviews, notes etc) published by the journal in 2009 and 2010.
2011 impact factor = A/B.
In order to evaluate a paper we don’t need to find the IF because it’s a journal metric. For the paper we should find out the citations and Google Academia can definitely help with it. I searched for this information on http://scholar.google.se.focus.lib.kth.se
It provides an easy way to widely search for scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources: articles, abstracts, books from academic publishers, online repositories, professional societies, universities etc.
On the seminar we have discussed various journals and papers with my colleagues. It was really useful to know more about the analysis of publications: the purpose of the study, the main concepts, what research design is used etc. I discovered an interesting journal (New Media & Society) on the Course wiki after the seminar.
I really liked the discussion on Wed. We shared our thoughts about Russell's book. I must say that now I have better understanding of all issues.
Follow up:
* sense-data is a data by yourself, a kind of mental data (the world of a happy person is different from the world of an unhappy person). Its a basis for perception.
* a proposition and a statement of fact are a sort of synonyms. What kind of verbal expression is the proposition? (questions, conditions, suggestions, performatives)
I really liked the discussion on Wed. We shared our thoughts about Russell's book. I must say that now I have better understanding of all issues.
Follow up:
* sense-data is a data by yourself, a kind of mental data (the world of a happy person is different from the world of an unhappy person). Its a basis for perception.
* a proposition and a statement of fact are a sort of synonyms. What kind of verbal expression is the proposition? (questions, conditions, suggestions, performatives)
I also found the discussion on today's seminar very fruitful. The description of sense-data as "data for yourself, a kind of mental data" is indeed a concise and helpful description. It somewhat points out that the human brain might be considered to be a "human computer"!
ReplyDeleteEmma, I agree with you. It helps me to understand it better in such way. The "human computer" is even more difficult than machines.
ReplyDeleteSometimes it is possible to "train" our mind or "human computer" to see what we want to see. For example until recently, people did not know that the color orange was a different color, they had convince their brains that it was a close nuance of red, and they were referring to it as the red color.
ReplyDeleteHey Marina,
ReplyDeleteI know I’m kind of late with my comment on the impact factor/ number of citations, but I want to know if you have been satisfied with the papers and the articles you choose in the last weeks regarding to the impact factor/number of citations? I ask you this because I was sometimes disappointed with my articles and their number of citations. Sometimes an article with fewer citations seemed to be more qualitative than the ones with a high number of citations (the same with journals and their impact factor). I think these two figures stand more for the actual relevance of papers and journals than about their actual quality. What do you think?