Question 1

What is an impact factor, and what is an h-index?

Accepted Answer

Two widely used metrics — one measuring a **journal**, one measuring a **researcher** — both extensively criticised and both still consequential for careers and funding.

**Journal impact factor.** The average number of citations received in a year by articles published in that journal over the preceding two years. Intended as a measure of a journal's influence.

**Why it is a poor measure of individual articles:**

**Citation distributions are extremely skewed.** A small number of highly cited papers account for most citations, so the **mean is unrepresentative** — the typical paper in a high impact factor journal receives far fewer citations than the figure implies. Judging a paper by its journal's impact factor is statistically indefensible.

**It varies enormously by field**, because citation practices differ. Comparing across disciplines is meaningless.

**It can be gamed** — through review articles, editorial practices and citation encouragement.

**Two years is arbitrary** and disadvantages fields where work accumulates citations slowly.

**The h-index.** A researcher has an index of *h* if they have published *h* papers each cited at least *h* times. It attempts to balance productivity against influence in one number.

**Its problems:**

**It cannot decrease**, so it rises with career length regardless of current activity, and systematically disadvantages early-career researchers and anyone with a career break.

**Field-dependent**, with very different typical values across disciplines.

**Insensitive to exceptional work** — an extraordinarily influential paper raises it by at most one.

**Ignores author position and contribution**, treating a sole author and one of fifty equally.

**Database-dependent**, giving different values in different sources.

**The reform movement.** The **San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)** explicitly recommends against using journal metrics to assess individual research, and has been signed by a large number of institutions and funders. The **Leiden Manifesto** sets out principles for responsible metric use, and several funders now require narrative CVs describing contribution rather than metric lists.

**The practical tension:** assessment panels have limited time and many applications, and metrics are quick — which is why criticised measures persist despite widespread agreement about their weaknesses.

Question 2

Why are there so many different referencing styles?

Accepted Answer

Because different disciplines need different information foregrounded, and each developed conventions that suit how it actually reads and uses sources. The main families: Author-date systems

Question 3

What is the difference between a conference paper and a journal article?

Accepted Answer

How they are reviewed, how quickly they appear, and how much they count — and the answer varies enormously by discipline, which is the source of most cross-field misunderstanding. Journal article.

Question 4

What do university rankings actually measure?

Accepted Answer

Whatever their compilers decided to weight, which differs enormously between them — and the resulting tables measure institutional characteristics far more than they measure what a student would

Question 5

What is the replication crisis, and what is being done about it?

Accepted Answer

The finding that a substantial proportion of published research findings cannot be reproduced when the studies are repeated — documented most prominently in psychology and medicine, and subsequently

Question 6

What is the difference between a literature review and a systematic review?

Accepted Answer

Whether the method is specified in advance and reproducible. A literature review surveys what has been written; a systematic review follows a pre-registered protocol designed to find and appraise all

Question 7

What does critical thinking actually mean in academic work?

Accepted Answer

Not criticism, and not scepticism about everything — it means evaluating the strength of a claim's support rather than reporting the claim. What tutors are actually asking for when feedback says

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