Glorious morning wishes to all of you as I wake up to a record high of 12 #predatoryjournal spam mails. Fabulous to hear they have promoted me to Prof. & they forgot to insert their "journal name". @GreetingsForDay Today, let's talk about sci publishing & incentives! /Thread

For the scientists in the crowd: how many predatory journal emails do you receive per week?

Sometimes, it is really obvious to pick them out, but other times, the names sound very real and are close to journals we know well and trust. There are a number of lists published online, but since new ones seem to pop up every day, it is hard to keep a reliable catalog going.

Unfortunately, there is definitely a strong #publishorperish culture in academic medical research, and our strange incentive structure only helps such predatory journals thrive. Speaking of, have you ever (critically) thought about how we measure the achievements of scientists?

So, I think this varies a lot from field to field, but in academic medical research and related domains, this is a big topic of discussion right now. Of course, whether you "measure up" as a scientist determines a lot about your future career trajectory.

Have you heard about journal impact factors (IFs)? The #impactfactor = yearly average number of times articles published in that journal (usually within the last 2 years) were cited in other scientific work. A rather wonky metric, but still carries a huge weight in my field.

The impact factor is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field. Higher IF journals are "deemed" more important. Whether you think this is a good metric or not, it says nothing about the importance or impact of any single article!