Scientists are universally familiar with the Impact Factor, even if they’re often frustrated with how it can be manipulated and misused. More recently, Ferric Fang and Arturo Casadevall have introduced the idea of the Retraction Index, a measure of how many papers journals retract for every 1,000 they publish. As science journalists who have spent the last 2 years closely monitoring retractions, we think this is a great idea.
Last year, in a post on our blog Retraction Watch, we recommended that journals publicize their Retraction Indices just as they trumpet their Impact Factors. It’s unlikely many will take us up on the suggestion, but we’ll go once more into the breach anyway and suggest another metric of journal performance: the Transparency Index.
Regardless of what metric scientists use to rank journals, one of the reasons they read the top-ranked journals is their sense that the information is reliable. We ...
