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Scholcomm's Thought-Terminating Clichés

High impact? Problematic? Are we starting conversations or stopping them. (348 words / January 24, 2025)

Published onJan 24, 2025
Scholcomm's Thought-Terminating Clichés

Journal Impact Factor is intended to speak to impact (a related but separate concept from ‘quality’) for journals (as opposed to individual articles). Therefore, a concept like “high impact” is misused when a journal’s general reputation stands in for the quality of an individual article. Similarly, terms like ‘predatory’ can attribute blanket negative associations to individual articles, when the appropriate target is the journal or publisher.

Being issued an Impact Factor by Clarivate or getting named on Cabell’s naughty list ostensibly intends to communicate something specific and contextual about a journal. But these messages tend to become reduced to simple and repeatable phrases like This is a high impact journal or I’ve heard that’s a problematic journal. These are not only clichés, they are thought-stoppers.

In 1961, R.J. Lifton characterized thought-terminating clichés as when:

The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized, and easily expressed. They become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.

Recently, ThirdKey announced that LibKey Nomad was integrating data from Cabell’s. Researchers with the browser extension individually-installed or using library services that incorporate it will now see a “Problematic Journal” flag beneath articles published by journals identified by Cabell’s. The whisper train has reported that some librarians are asking for other discovery services to follow in similar suit.

The allure of alerting users that an outlet has been identified by a third party as “problematic” is understandable. But how understandable “problematic” as a concept is to the average user, I do not know.

So many low-level college assignments call for papers to cite some number of resources identified as “peer-reviewed”. These are often intended to introduce students to the variety of information resources available. So you’ve identified that something has been peer-reviewed, but what does that mean on any level deeper than the surface?

It’s possible that adding a “problematic” flag into the mix will inspire users to ask deeper questions about information. It’s also possible we are just adding placebo buttons to an elevator that only ever stops on the Dunning-Kruger floor.

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