Speaking of the major events in the academic community in June, it must be the impact factor of this year's SCI journal officially announced by ISI.

What is an impact factor, and why is it so important in academia?

In fact, it is very simple, because it can tell you with the most adequate data and without any subjective factors, which country is stronger in science and technology now!

As a member of the academic community, Wu Bin is of course also very concerned about the announcement of the impact factor, because it allows him to understand the general scientific research situation of the world and China last year.

When he turned on the computer, Wu Bin couldn't help but think of what Professor Lin complained about yesterday: "China is a weak country in science and technology in the eyes of most people." ”

But this can't be blamed on ordinary people who don't care about scientific research, because it takes several steps to successfully enter your daily life and become an ordinary object around you.

The first is the basic research that most scientists need to do, cells, atoms, materials, which represent the foundation of the edifice of science and technology.

Then there is applied research, such as the graphene that Wu Bin is currently researching, only when he thoroughly studies the properties of the material, then researchers in related fields can think about how to apply it to their own research fields according to the basic properties of the material.

When the application is successful, there will be a factory to build it, and then it will enter the eyes of ordinary people.

To give you a simple example, a ballpoint pen is too common to be common, and absolutely no one thinks of it as high-tech.

However, in fact, the polish of ballpoint pens is very particular, and the basic ingredients include dyes, film formers, solvents, dispersants and other additives.

Not to mention the highly technical nib beads.

Why is a ballpoint pen called a ballpoint pen, and why is it not guaranteed that the excess pen oil leaks out while writing words, because the thickness of the bowl mouth of the ball body of the small bead is only 0.4 mm, and it actually has to withstand a lot of pressure when you write, if the material used is not strong enough, it will break very well.

And how to solve these problems? It's up to those who work in the basic sciences.

Therefore, it is a very long process for a thing to be manufactured from a research direction to be manufactured, and the finished product does not necessarily conform to the "high technology" that most people have in their hearts

The reason why the people feel that China's science and technology are very weak is because the people of China have actually gone from being oppressed by the great powers to having enough to eat, and now becoming the "strongest developing country", in fact, it is decades, and many things are still in basic research and even theory, and it will take a lot of time to really break out.

You must know that Huaguo is a country that completely missed the first and second industrial revolutions, and the basic theory actually has many loopholes, and it can only be described as incredible to be able to catch up to the current step.

Thinking of this, Wu Bin often thinks of a sentence that Li Yan likes to complain about when he swipes Weibo.

"The media uses their mouths to do scientific research, while scientists use their hands, and it is clear who can bring the rhythm at a glance."

Coming back to the impact factor, it is the most powerful data used to measure the success of basic research.

Because the results of basic research cannot be directly presented as finished products, most of them are published in the form of papers.

So how do you know the quality of a paper? Just look at the number of times it is cited.

Those papers that have been cited hundreds or thousands of times must be good articles, there is no hype in them, buy data, buy water army, and those who are serious will definitely be cited by their peers.

As for the impact factor, it is the average number of citations of the journal article.

In the face of the rise and fall of the impact factor, even if it is a journal in the scientific research community, it is rare to be neither humble nor arrogant, for example, the "Energy & Environmental Science", which has been quite popular in recent years, has raised the impact factor to 22.118 in five years by using the method of increasing and decreasing the draft (scientific research bigwigs write reviews and editors control manuscripts).

Regardless of word-of-mouth, its successful model has been borrowed by many innovative journals anyway.

First of all, Wu Bin first looked at the general trend of the scientific research community, that is, the "Nature Index"

This is an index produced by the Nature publishing group in 2014, and the purpose is simple: they will count the papers in 68 leading academic journals that are internationally recognized, and then count them through three counting methods.

On the [Country Outputs] page, Wu Bin can use the three statistical rankings of AC, FC and FC to know which countries are young experts in scientific research this year.

The first is AC (Article Count), which simply means that for an article, no matter how many truckloads of co-authors you have, as long as one of the authors belongs to a university or scientific research institution in a certain country, then the article will give the AC value of that country +1

Then there is the FC (fractional count) fractional measurement, which divides the contribution value of all authors in each article into N parts, and each author will have a percentage of contribution, and then the percentage of authors belonging to the same country is added together to get the FC value of each country.

The final FC (ighted fractional count) is called weighted fractional measurement, which is an improvement of the trade-off fractional system, which is entirely due to the exaggeration of many articles in the fields of astronomy and astrophysics among the many articles sampled by the Naure Index! It can be said that the number of articles far exceeds that of other fields.

Therefore, in order to balance the influence of various fields, it is simple and crude to directly multiply a weight coefficient of 0.2 on the FC of the two fields.

The result is an index that can be said to be completely objective.

"America is still a dad......

Looking at the list displayed on the computer, Wu Bin couldn't help but shake his head.

AC：28032，FC：18658.70，FC：16584.86

All three data are stable in ...... Oh no, number one.

It is a full 2.5 times higher than Huaguo, which is in second place.

That's right, the second place in the nature index is Huaguo,

AC：9429，FC：6695.66，FC：6308.33

The three data are all well-deserved second places, which was actually completely unexpectedly when Wu Bin checked this data for the first time.

And the third place is the absolute scientific and technological power in the eyes of most people, Germany.

AC：9035，FC：4556.49，FC：3940.19

"It's a cut higher than last year." Suddenly, a sense of national pride in Wu Bin's heart couldn't help but rise.

Although there are still several levels behind the fight with US imperialism, in the second group of scientific research countries, Huaguo is still a steady leader.

In second place in the Asian zone is Japan, which is in fifth place.

AC：4887，FC：3123.13，FC：2877.27

It is twice as weak as Huaguo, which makes Wu Bin's heart happy.

After roughly browsing the top 20 countries, Wu Bin clicked on the link of the Huaguo tab and came to the General analysis page of Huaguo.