METHODOLOGY

1) Showing that the IF employ has different meanings according to the scientific area of journals; and that editors value it distinctively according to their scientific origin. This will be done by comparing the communication strategy from journals of two Social Sciences Disciplines (Communication and Sociology) and two disciplines from Sciences (Biochemistry and Physics). For each area the team will select the first quarter of publications by Impact Factor in the Journal of Citation Report (JCR). This sample will be subject to quantitative and qualitative content analysis, to establish if the way those journals value their own IF is distinct according to their scientific area; and what are their communication strategies regarding the presentation of their own impact factor. From these results one expects to gather data on publication cultures in the humanities, reportable to point 2) of our objectives; bringing the question to public debate.

2) As to point 3) of the objectives, we intend to approach the subject by starting to show that different rules and indexing/ordering criteria produce different results and metrics. As a consequence, the objectivity of an Impact Factor isn't an "absolute" (as a medieval scholar would put it), but is always relative to what is being measured, and to the way, the procedures upon which is being measured. To perform the study we'll compare the IF (Impact Factor based in the algorithm patented by ISI), SJR (SCImago Journal Rank, based in the Page Rank algorithm from Google), and SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper, which measures the contextualized impact of citations based on the total number of citations of a scientific area) of Communication and Biochemistry journals common to ISI and Scopus. The hypothesis being tested is that, by employing different measuring criteria, one obtains different impact orders for the magazines, and that the ISI ranking will be different from the Scopus ranking. Furthermore, we'll find out if the variation in the ranks is larger in Social Sciences (Communication) than in Sciences (Biochemistry), accounting for the less stable results in the bibliometric production of Social Sciences.

3) To approach the 4th goal the project intends to compare the Hirsch-Índex of world class researchers, and Portuguese researchers from centers classified with Excellent or Very Good by FCT (on the Social Sciences part), and compare the h-number of similar sample, top class researchers and Portuguese researchers from Biochemistry and Physics (sample representing Sciences). For each of the eight groups that form the sample we'll obtain the h-number in ISI, Scopus and Google Scholar. From these data one intends to analyze the variation between the values obtained from data-bases and Google Scholar. Our hypothesis is that such variation will be much smaller in the Natural Sciences than in the Social Sciences. It is even possible for the h-index of a biochemist to be higher in ISI than in Google Scholar, accounting for the stability of publication cultures in the area; and that the opposite, with a larger and reverse variation, would occur in Communication Sciences and Sociology, caused by the importance of book publishing, and by the fact that only Google Scholar indexes this type of object. That said, it's time to mention that these are the results expected from our earlier hypothesis, but the actual results, and the size of the gap in the h-nº measured in the three databases is absolutely unknown, as it has never been studied. After gathering the sample, and solving the epistemic problem of "how to select world class researchers, ignoring the metrics that allegedly distinguish top class researchers", to access the data required for this study we shall use the bibliometric indicators produced by ISI and Scopus, while for obtaining Google Scholar data we'll employ the software Publish or Perish, of A. W. Harzig, which produces bibliometry from Google raw data, and available in www.harzing.com/pop.htm

4) In addressing goal 5) we'll conduct a compared study from the networks stemming from the editorial board of top ISI journals in Communication and Sociology, by selecting the first IF quarter. We intend to examine if the quality of being and editor raises the probability of authoring articles in any other journals of the sample. This study intends also to determine the percentage of "exogenous" authoring, that is, the percentage of authors published that don't belong to the editorial board of the publications included in the sample. Here we're not being guided by any hypothesis, and are not expecting x or y results. One merely expects the results to be significant and meaningful, allowing to shed some light over the importance of social networking in the activity of publishing and communicating science.

5) Point 6) of our goals will be achieved by conducting a survey among scientists from the sampled fields (Communication, Sociology, Biochemistry and Physics) from Portuguese research centers evaluated with Excellent or Very Good. Our aim is to produce and establish data for the Portuguese reality, but also to inquire if there are attitude difference towards these subjects between scientists from Natural Sciences and Humanities and Social Sciences.