iMechanica - journal rankings - Comments

I will immediately sell my Google stocks now!

Mike Ciavarella — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 10:16:57 -0400

;)

Search Mechanical+Engineering+Forum in Google.

Roozbeh Sanaei — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 10:12:45 -0400

Search Mechanical+Engineering+Forum in Google.
This
one comes before Imechanica. (at least in my computer!).

I dont think any body tries to PUMP this blog into Google.

Laptop for College (Mechanical Engineering Student)

General Questions
1) What is your budget?
$1000-$1600
2) What size
notebook would you prefer?
a. Ultraportable; 12" screen or less
b. Thin
and Light; 13" - 14" screen
c. Mainstream; 15" - 16" screen
d. Desktop
Replacement; 17"+ screen
-B-
3) Please select your country's flag as a
post icon and tell us what country are you buying this in.
U.S.
4) Are
there any brands that you prefer or any you really don't like?
5) What tasks
will you be performing with the notebook?
Pretty much all the normal stuff
except for gaming. I dont really need my laptop to be a great gaming machine.
Also, I'm majoring in mechanical engineering so I'll need to run programs like
autoCAD.
6) Will you be taking the notebook with you to different places or
leaving it on your desk?
Mostly desk.
7) Will you be playing games on it;
if so, which games?
No
8) How many hours of battery life do you
need?
Over 5 preferably.
9) Do you mind buying online without seeing the
notebook in person?
No
10) What OS do you prefer? Windows (XP or Vista),
Mac OS, Linux, etc.
Not sure. Xp or Vistas fine.
Screen Specifics
11)
From the choices below, what screen resolutions would you prefer?
[B]d.
WXGA or WXGA+ - 1280x768/800 or 1440x900; Wider viewing version of XGA, good for
movie viewing or spreadsheets.[/B
e. WSXGA+ - 1680x1050; Wider viewing
version of SXGA, good for movie viewing or spreadsheets.
f. WUXGA -
1920x1200; Wider viewing version of UXGA, good for movie viewing or
spreadsheets.
-D-
12) Do you want a glossy/reflective screen or a
matte/non-glossy screen?
Glossy
Build Quality and Design
13) Are the
notebook's looks and stylishness important to you?
Somewhat
14) When are
you buying this laptop and how long do you want this laptop to last?
Early
August at the latest. Hopefully throughout college.
Notebook
Components
15) How much hard drive space do you want; 40GB to 500GB?
Not
really sure. 250GB sound good?
16) Do you need an optical drive? If yes, a
CDRW/DVD-ROM, DVD Burner or Blu-Ray drive?
DVD burner

but don't forget that "ranking" is a key to the Google success!

Mike Ciavarella — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 06:02:27 -0400

Bijwait

however, don't underestimate the importance of "ranking" --- it's the very key to the early success of Google. Google was the first company to heavily invest into ranking, and so documents you find on Google are high up ONLY if they have high access.

Of course, the very same success of Google, hides that advertissment and other forms of "pumping" the ranking by paying, is the other side of the medal. So very soon this will happen also in Science. People will pay, or at least form "citation clubs" to improve ranking and citations. I think I have posted already something about this when I discussed about the Research Excellence Framework in UK.

Regards

Mike

Biswajit, excellent reply -- are you sure we disagree? :)

Mike Ciavarella — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 04:06:28 -0400

I agree with most of what you say, except the comparison of H-index with Porn and Drug I think goes too far --- but is a good rethorical example.

I think our discussion is very fruitful, and I have already said you and Roozbeh are extremely good partners in the discussion, including when you are irritating :) See my recent comment from Anne-Wil Harzing directly A very interesting contribution from Anne-Wil Harzing !

I have to insist that there seem to be more interest in H-index, than in our REAL problems like the energy crisis. I think, and I am not alone (Sir Richard Branson said the same), that the energy crisis is a GOOD think--- in fact, finally we will agree to REDUCE the energy consumption. Maybe our USA friends will start to buy LESS of the Porsche Cayenne to go to Shopping Malls.

Where do you really think we disagree? I particularly like that you agree a LIST of the TOP papers is useful as a start for the young students.

I conclude that we probably agree at about 99%, and we can start work together on the same direction! :) If you read my post about the VIRGIN Challenge more carefully, I also suggested it is too hard for an individual (indeed as the prize of 25millions suggests), but for imechanica as a whole???

Re: H-index

Biswajit Banerjee — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 02:38:24 -0400

Dear Mike,

Your answers were not entirely satisfying. Let me reply to some of your points.

1) " That H-index is popular is a matter of fact, and does NOT depend on me." Indeed, drugs and porn are also quite popular and may even be useful to some people - does that mean that we should all start using them? Yours is not a scientific answer at all :)

2) The Virgin earth challenge is probably too difficult not any single person to address. Also, Eric's and Rozzbeh's (and also my) observations suggest that the number of reads is linearly related to the number of comments and may not reflect the number of readers. I have a suspicion that we may have only around 50 human readers per comment with the rest of the readers being in the form of bots and webcrawlers. So the number of hits does not mean that a topic is necessarily popular.

3) I don't think ranking is the prime motivation of scientists as a group or most people in general. However, you may be right that some academic scientists may be rank driven - academic departments do tend to select such individuals. Personally, I have found that many such rank-driven people are assholes (see Bob Sutton's No Asshole Rule [video ]).

4) Once again, I find the idea of ranking countries based on scientific output ridiculous. What generalization are uyou going to make about, say Cameroon? That all Cameroonians are idiots because their h-index is low? That reminds me of 19th century European racists who decided on the intelligence or otherwise of entire groups of people based on the shapes of their chin !

5) Surely you don't think that Dugdale's was the best paper ever to be published in JMPS! What do you mean by best?

6) It's good that you can afford to read the literature voraciously. I hope our younger readers get that message.

7) The Google scholar rankings do not separate out self citations and citations in arbitrary pages. I would like to see the actual number of citations of a paper by people who have not known the author personally. That would be a better measure of the actual impact of a paper. My opinion still remains that the exercise is pointless and a waste of our time though a list of highly cited papers (400 or more in our field, 2000 or more in physics) can be useful to a beginning graduate student.

Regards,

Biswajit

They don't work on my pc, a good PDF would be excellent....

Mike Ciavarella — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:19:18 -0400

With these links I need to effectively repeat the search, and why you want everybody to do that? I have for example my IP stuck on some searches because of problems with Google Scholar. OK to be coincise, but a nice list on imechanica with the hyperlinks would be better. Somebody did that on my original post, and I thank him/her.

JMPS Articles with 100 citations

Chad Landis — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:16:30 -0400

Let me know if these links work, and you can see them for yourself. Sometimes the site does not work. J MECH PHYS SOLIDS Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids

Yes, agreed with the experts that Google Scholas has a bug ;(

Mike Ciavarella — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:55:57 -0400

But maybe also SCOPUS, see my other post. Which finds JMPS & IJSS much lower than you found

The full list of journals ranked by H index --- but not the list of highlycited papers :(

Anyway, I guess the actual "number" is questionable, the list is more important.

Did you keep a copy of the 100 papers or your brute force effort was lost?

By brute force I guess.

Chad Landis — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:42:51 -0400

At least if you use Google's citation numbers then they are correct. This also assumes that I do not find the same paper from the search on "J MECH PHYS SOLIDS" and on "Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids".

Mike, You are correct, I will provide more statistics,

RoozbehSanaei — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 09:45:07 -0400

Those familiar with academia know that disputes over trademarks can be more intense (and, in a prurient sense, more interesting) than disputes over substance. hypothetical discussions is more interesting for me!, since this is very contraversy discussion, talking without having statistics in hand is worthless. i am very neutral in this discussion.be sure that it is not my personal problem!

Are you sure about these numbers? Scimago has actually lower..

Mike Ciavarella — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 08:47:06 -0400

Chad

how did you do this calculation, and can I see the 100 papers with at least 100 citations please?

If you see Scimago, based on Scopus we find H=63 for JMPS so lower than the 100 you indicate

Also I did very carefully about with PoP and I found 79 so not too distant from my first number (see attached image) and see also

The full list of journals ranked by H index

bibliometric based evaluation is very chaotic!.

RoozbehSanaei — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 05:43:01 -0400

This is very different with Impact factor based
ranking, and it shows one thing, bibliometric based evaluation is very chaotic!.because of High Noise to Signal Ratio!

I have found the full list of journals at least for...

Mike Ciavarella — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 05:27:27 -0400

you are all invited to check

The full list of journals ranked by H index

You will find that mechanics is loosing terrain, and in particular JMPS with respect to IJSS !

These facts are published, people go ignorantly!

RoozbehSanaei — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 05:15:58 -0400

I have done some research and i found mathematical correlation between citation numbers (also h factors) of sub-topics and citation (also h factor) of scientists. (i think it is very obvious).

dependence of h factor on size of country is already published and agreed.

Forget Nature, Science and A. Einestein, we want to use h factor for more ordinary cases. it is not correct for them. have you published paper in Nature? I have not!.

i will refer to papers instead of comments after this.

ok but if you can follow the conversation a little more focused.

Mike Ciavarella — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 05:00:47 -0400

Roozbeh

if you want to compare mechanics to other fields, this is a serious idea, let's do it. You probably have realized that classical mechanics is indeed dying and many people jumped into biological - related mechanics. See Huajian Gao and his successful research at

http://www.engin.brown.edu/Faculty/gao/gaogroup/

However you usually raise 10 ideas but never complete any of them / this is dangerous like Leonardo who wrote at his time 14000 pages of science, and never published anything!

So you risk the paradox of blogs : you work on how research has impact, but you will PERISH if you never PUBLISH! It is true that we are moving to DEMO or DYE or to Publish AND Perish, but you need to be careful

Now, to go back to your distinction, it is very true that impact is not equally distributed among disciplines this is well known you are NOT the first to say or notice I am afraid!

Go to http://www.isihighlycited.com/ you will find the best or at least the 250 most highlycited scientist for each of 21 disciplines, totalling 5250 scientists. You will be also surprised to find that 4014 are from US, which strikes with the distribution of H-index and of total of documents, which you find instead at

http://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php

Actually I found there also already the H index of journals! Nature has H=531 so H works as you see despite your criticisms....

I will write something about all this more precisely when I find more time. Please now also take your time to think about before responding with 10 more comments.

Thank you.