Impact factor

Anglo-saxon countries and continental Europe countries are contrasted in many ways, also in the way they publish scientific discoveries and researches (at least in my field, biodiversity). Anglo-saxons as a rule publish many short articles, continentals few large books - anglo-saxons are r-selected, continental Europe are K-selected. Today, research success is more and more measured by the number of citationsa work receives by other scientists. Unfortunately. books are not indexed in the large databases that count citations, and this means that people publishing fundamental books are unrated. THis is quite silly - it would suffice to begin to index also scientific books, since these are routinely cited in the bibliographies of papers. Consider for instance Hubbel - he published many papers on Nature, but the huge impact he had on ecology is related to his fundamental book "the unified theory of biogeograophy and biodiversity, that received hundreds of citations (often for confutations).