Academic Journal "Impact Factor"

The latest newsletter of AEJMC -- the mothership of academic organizations for those in journalism and masscomm -- includes an article (page 8) entitled:

Journal Impact Factors and Communcation Studies: A Report from the National Communication Association

You know it's important -- there's a colon in the title. So what's it mean?

Hard to say. This fuzzy article suggests, stunningly, that we should take care in the growing use of impact factors in evaluating academic journals. You can follow the link to read more about impact factors, but basically it's how often a journal is cited. That's the gold standard of research, by the way -- how often other scholars cite your work. The impact factor just cranks the data and feeds back to you a number, one ripe with measurement error and of course one that fails to account for the quality of a particular journal or study published in that journal.

(or, basically, you complain about the number if it doesn't score your work, or your journal, high enough)

The article itself, linked to above, suggests we need "extensive educational and outreach initiatives to educate members, administrators, and other interested parties about the nature and quality of the journal impact factor as a measure of journal quality, research quality, or research influence." Wow. That's a mouthful to say more or less nothing. Another warns we need to "guard against the misuse of journal impact factors and make public examples of such misuse when it occurs" (emphasis mine). I like this one, especially the part of making public examples of people. Academic stocks, maybe? Stoning? I'm not sure.

Okay, enough snark in what is meant to be a well-meaning, if academically overwritten, point, that influence factor scores are a bit misleading but the danger is, especially in promotion and tenure, we may lean on them more heavily than they deserve.That's the lede. That said, while I'm a journalism guy, I'm also a numbers guy, and I'm not terribly upset by the way this score is measured or its "impact" on decision making.

(er, unless you're talking about my journals or my work ...)

Now, all this said, I definitely check on how often my work gets cited. For example, a study I published in 1995 has been cited 95 times, according to Google Scholar. That's not half bad and, based on a quick scanning of colleagues in my college, better than most.

Googling the SEC

Just for fun, I started doing a Google search on SEC schools to see what word pops up after the school name.So I teach at the University of Georgia. If I Google "University of Georgia" the next thing to pop up is:

football

Sigh. You kinda expected that, right? Or if not, you're hardly surprised. But how about some of the other SEC schools? Let's take a look, in no particular order:

• University of Florida gators. Only one where nickname appears first.
  
• University of Tennessee _____. Oddly Google offers nothing next. Just type Tennessee and it's Titans, the NFL team.
• University of Alabama football
• University of South Carolina ___. Nuthin. Interesting. Just South Carolina and it's earthquake, then football.
• University of Kentucky basketball. Makes sense.
• University of Arkansas ____. Again, nuthin. Just Arkansas, though, and it's Razorbacks.
• University of Mississippi medical center. Friggin weird.
• Auburn University ___. Now, if you just do Auburn, it's football.
• Mississippi State University ____. Like Auburn above, leave off university and football appears.
• Louisiana State University gets ___. LSU gets, of course, football.
• University of Missouri gets, duh, -Columbia. In case you can't find it on a map, I suppose. No GPS in Missouri?
• Texas A&M gets, yes, football. Surprised it's not Johnny Football.
• Vanderbilt University gets ___, but just Vanderbilt gets football.

Now Google senses where you are and builds that into its search, so maybe because I'm in the South it grasps the near-religious nature of college football and feeds that back to me. Maybe. It really bases this on what other people have searched for, trying to fill in the blanks for you, so sports, especially football, clearly dominate. I think of all the schools, UF gets its nickname and no others do. I'm not sure what's up with the medical center thing in Mississippi unless it's amazing to find a hospital there.

How about outside the football-crazed SEC? Let's try a few random names:

• Notre Dame football. 
• University of Wisconsin Madison (for the geographically challenged). Just Wisconsin gets you basketball.
• THE Ohio State University gets you, like Mississippi above, a medical center. OSU gets you football.
• Rutgers gets football. No idea why.
• University of Texas football. Kinda funny, given their recent season.

and so on. As you can see, people who search for universities tend to focus on the dominant sports teams.

Again, sigh.

UGA Bracketology

It's March, and that means brackets. Here, I've taken all the schools and colleges at UGA and tossed them into a bracket to see who wins. Below are the first round match-ups:

• Social Work vs Pharmacy: Yes, the pharm folks have the drugs, mostly because they work for big companies while the social work folks work for next to nothing and for the better good. As crazy as the social worker types can be, it's hard to pull against them.
• Engineering vs Law: A match-up of heavyweights. No one likes lawyers, kinda like no one likes Duke, so I'm betting on the engineers even if you'd get a better program at a school just down the road a bit.
• Education vs Vet Med. Teachers vs puppies and kittens? No contest.
•  Ag and Environmental Sciences vs Business. Another school (biz) that (like Duke) no one likes. I'm betting the crowd gets behind the CAES folks and they pull the upset. Plus they do actual research.
• Environment & Design vs Public Health. It's hard to pick here, the folks who help make us better versus the folks who make nice things to look at.
• Journalism & Mass Comm vs Law. No one ever pulls for the lawyers, but then again no one pulls for journalists either. Those with the money win, and that's not journalists.
• Ecology vs Forestry. Talk about dream match-ups, the tree huggers and the folks with saws face off in a grudge match with druids everywhere eager for one outcome versus the other.
• Arts & Sciences vs SPIA. Franklin A&S is so big and so fat and so comfortable that I smell an upset by the upstart SPIAnistas, who are hungry.

So, how it'd all turn out? Go here and see my final bracket and the ultimate winner.

Grady at Wall Street

Hijacking my blog for a Grady PSA:

Four journalism students are participating in a fellowship of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers organized and sponsored by our Cox Institute.  Nicholas Fouriezos, Kathleen LaPorte, Cailin O'Brien and Maria Torres will spend their Spring Break on Wall Street visiting and training at The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, Yahoo Finance, the New York Stock Exchange and Oppenheimer.  They were selected based on their performance in our advanced reporting course, which focused on business journalism in Fall and Spring 2013.  Keith Herndon, who taught the courses following his Reynolds Fellowship in Business Journalism, will accompany them on the trip.

Teaching Hospital vs. Theme Park Journalism

A popular approach to teaching journalism, one promoted by the Knight Foundation's Eric Newton, among others, is the teaching hospital method. Like medical school students, so goes the idea, students learn by doing. Not just doing it in a classroom, mind you, but doing it in real life. It's hard to argue with that.

Of course lots of j-schools do just this, through their student news operations or, like at UGA, through those independent of the university, in our case The Red & Black. I bring this up because here at Grady we're in the midst of an accelerated curriculum discussion prompted in part by a TV station downstairs that's running deep in the red. OnlineAthens has a good story today on the station (you can read the actual report here), which is likely to be sold and somehow we're going to create a new curriculum that will make use of that suddenly available space. As part of this, journalism will likely combine with broadcast news as a department, and curriculum.

Okay, fine. I have you up to speed as best I can on what's happening at Grady. Lemme push it a bit more.

I'm on two committees looking at this and someone came up with an interesting alternative to a teaching hospital approach, one I think deserves discussion. A teaching hospital can drive the curriculum, the tail wagging the dog, plus it's hard to staff 24/7, especially between semesters. Instead of a regional newsroom covering the basics, and training kids to work in a declining industry, we're looking at more entrepreneurial and innovative uses. The one I'm discussing here is the idea of a theme-based newsroom. A journalism theme park, if you will. So this year, we're going to focus on a single theme, say obesity or hunger or whatever. That becomes the "theme" of journalism students, of broadcast/TV students, of online stuff, of advertising students, of PR kids. It would reach across the curriculum, across the college, and reach across the University and involve students from, say, social work. Plus it would not require 24/7 staffing, not require students cover sewer board meetings (they'll do that in basic reporting classes). We'd use this as a capstone experience, or an upper-level set of courses. I dunno.

So, your thoughts?

Where UGA freshmen come from

I was messing with some data today. The map below shows you which high schools sent kids to UGA in the 2013 freshman class. You can click on the various schools to get the names, how many kids sent, and the school's rank.



Oh, a raw Excel file is here that lists the schools by rank. Data from UGA's factbook. I'm trying to do the same for 2003 and make a comparison, but the 2003 data is being difficult for some reason.

Titular Colonicity -- JMCQ Style

I've written before about titular colonicity -- in part because the name tickles me, in part because it says something about academic research. Quite simply, the hypothesis argues that as an academic field matures, more research article titles include colons. Well, the latest issue of Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, the main journal in my field, came out this week and in it you'll find a good example of colonicity being very titular. Of the eight studies published, six include a colon. Of the two that foolishly forgot to use a colon, one has a question mark in the middle of the title, so we'll give it a pass.

In JMCQ's spring issue 10 years earlier, only six of 11 published studies included a colon. Ten years before that, six of 13 studies included the magic colon.

So is mass comm maturing as a field, as measured by colons in titles? I actually did a quick-and-fast-and-dirty and non-systematic study of colons and found that indeed their use has increased in our field. What that means I can't say, but one of these days I'm going to do a real analysis of colons in the major mass comm journals and submit the results to AEJMC, just for the hell of it and just to give some reviewer a reason to not accept a paper.

And just in case you think I'm making this crap up, here's an analysis of the so-called Dillion Hypothesis about colons in titles from studies published in the ecological sciences. As the abstract states:

In general, the results of this study support the Dillon Hypothesis of Titular Colonicity.

So there.