Podcast For Progress

This episode is the first 'Q&A' episode, where my new co-host Dr. Bart Geurten (see episode 8) and I talk about what's new in academia. Our conversations are free form and may lead us astray here and there. We discuss the concept of 'merit' in the natural sciences. And we begin with a quick recap on episode 9, where I talked to Dr. Björn Brembs about the Journal Impact Factor (JIF). The JIF is a metric designed to measure the impact a journal had in the scientific community. There are many problems with how JIFs are generated. What is even worse is the misuse of this metric for estimating the scientific ability of a single author of one article published in a journal. Listen to the Full Conversation on Patreon! Bart tells us about how he himself took the news about how the JIF can be influenced by the journals, and the reactions of his colleagues. The omnipresent use of the JIF is guiding the decisions of our generation and it's not questioned enough. Björn Brembs had mentioned how the reviewers