Editorial: Impact beyond data

Christopher H. Knight

摘要

I experimented with typing this article in 'Impact' font. It turned out to be almost illegible: impact of a sort, but not a good outcome for me and meaningless to the reader, since the typesetter will choose the font that you actually see. There is a simple message: impact is not an easy concept. Journal Impact Factor (IF) is a case in point. Our Impact Factor has increased in each of the last two years and we expect it to do so again this year. That is good news for the Journal and good news for authors, although please remember that the link between IF and scientific quality is tenuous at a Journal level (1 have previously mentioned in these pages that the index was originally intended as nothing more than a tool for librarians apportioning limited subscription funding) and even more so at an article level. Nevertheless, it is gratifying to see our published work being cited at an increasing rate and, given the long-term nature of much of dairy research, within a relatively short time frame (five articles from our August 2020 Special Issue are already cited, for example). Over the last five years our global JDR Community has grown to now number almost 4000, and there has been an upsurge in submissions from countries where scientific research has historically had only a local audience or none at all. In terms of dissemination to a global scientific audience, we are surely having impact. As a submitting author you are asked to briefly describe how your research 'advances relevant knowledge or understanding and 'benefits animal or human society. In other words, we are seeking two forms of impact: academic and societal. By publishing novel data we contribute to academic impact, although it should be remembered that data, in itself, has limited or no value without concomitant interpretation and subsequent exploitation. It is perhaps not surprising that the three most cited articles from 2020 were all reviews, but looking back over the last three years the picture is quite different; ten out of the twelve most cited articles were research papers reporting original data. I consider this to be an important and healthy observation, but it is not without complications. Since the window for generating IF is two years, were we to focus more on reviews our IF would increase more rapidly, but less data would be published and so one could argue that our true academic impact would suffer in the longer term. Our contribution to societal development is harder to quantify. Had it been possible during 2020 to show that a novel bioactive casein fragment protected against SARS-CoV-2 infection the impact would have been monumental, but to my knowledge there has been no such observation (please prove me wrong if you can!) With the possible exception of HIV, this is the first time in a lifetime that the developed world has faced a major disease pandemic and the impact on lives and livelihoods has been enormous, although some context is needed. Globally, Covid-19 was associated with around 2.2 M deaths in the year to January 2021, with updated data being reported on every major news outlet on a daily basis. In the same period of time, around 9 M people around the world would have died from hunger or diseases associated with hunger, around one-third of these being children with their whole life ahead of them. The world was largely unaware. From an academic point of view, all of the Covid-19 data collected in an attempt to prevent transmission of the virus will probably prove to have much less real impact than the applied research of those academics who set about developing vaccines, and it is to be hoped that, firstly, SARS-CoV-2 will fairly soon become another manageable affliction in the same genre as polio, smallpox or influenza and, secondly, that we shall be better prepared, as a society, when coronavirus version 3 arrives. One thing is quite certain, and to illustrate it I go back in time thirty-five years to this quote: 'Throughout history and prehistory, the human race has had a major struggle to procure a safe and nutritionally adequate supply of food which is stable over time. There have been successes and failures in this struggle, and it continues, for the number of people in the world goes on growing while the land resource is fixed in amount'. This is taken from the first chapter of 'From Dearth to Plenty' (Blaxter and Robertson, 1995), which tells the story of the agricultural revolution occurring in developed countries in the fifty years from 1936 to 1986. As the title implies, food shortages became almost unheard of for those living in the developed world. However, our global population continues to expand and so, at a global level, hunger and starvation will be with us for far longer than the pandemic. Furthermore, the situation will get significantly worse as a direct consequence of the pandemic (shorter term) allied with a decreasing land resource consequential on climatic change (longer term). For some, the 'P

机译：我尝试在“影响”字体中输入这篇文章。事实证明，几乎难以辨认：对我来说的影响，但对我来说不是一个很好的结果，因为排版是你实际看到的字体。有一个简单的消息：影响不是一个简单的概念。期刊影响因子（IF）是一个案例。我们的影响因素在过去两年中的每一个都有增加，我们希望今年再次这样做。这对作者来说，这是一个好消息，虽然请记住，如果和科学质量之间的联系在期刊级别（如此之前在这些页面中提到的，则该指数最初是只不过是一个工具对于分摊有限的订阅资金的图书馆员，甚至在文章级别。尽管如此，鉴于达到达到奶制研究的长期性质，在相对较短的时间范围内（来自我们8月2020年8月的五篇特别问题的五篇文章已经被引用了，它令人欣慰例子）。在过去的五年里，我们的全球JDR社区已经增长到现在近4000人，从历史上只有当地观众或者没有任何地方观众或者根本没有提交。在向全球科学观众的传播方面，我们肯定会影响。作为提交的作者，您要求简要介绍您的研究如何提高相关知识或理解以及益处动物或人类社会。换句话说，我们正在寻求两种影响：学术和社会。通过发布新的数据，我们有助于学术影响，尽管应该被记住，在没有伴随的解释和随后的剥削的情况下，数据本身具有有限或没有价值。这可能并不令人惊讶的是，来自2020年的三个最具引用的文章都是评论，但在过去三年中回顾了这幅画的情况很大;十二个最具引用的文章中的十个是报告原始数据的研究论文。我认为这是一个重要而健康的观察，但它并非没有并发症。由于窗口产生了两年的时间，我们要更多地关注我们的审查我们的如果会更快地增加，但较少的数据将被公布，所以可以争辩说我们真正的学术影响将在长期内遭受遭受的痛苦。我们对社会发展的贡献更难量化。如果它有可能在2020年期间表明一种新的生物活性酪蛋白片段保护免受SARS-COV-2感染的碎片，影响将是巨大的，但对于我的知识，没有这样的观察（如果可以，请证明我错了！）艾滋病毒的可能例外，这是发达国家第一次面临大流行的主要疾病，而对生活和生计的影响是巨大的，尽管需要一些背景。在全球范围内，Covid-19与2021年1月的年度大约2.2米的死亡有关，每天都会在每个主要新闻出口上报告更新数据。在同一时期，世界各地约有9米的人将死于与饥饿有关的饥饿或疾病，其中大约三分之一是他们在他们前面的一生中的一生。世界主要是不知不觉。从学术的角度来看，收集的所有Covid-19数据都试图防止病毒的传播可能是比对制定疫苗的那些学者的应用研究更少的实际影响，并且它是首先，SARS-COV-2将很快成为脊髓灰质炎，天花或流感的相同类型的另一个可管理的痛苦，其次是我们将更好地准备，作为社会，当冠心病版本3到来时。有一件事是完全肯定的，为了说明我回到三十五年来到这句话：“在整个历史和史前，人类已经重大斗争，以获得安全和营养充足的食物供应稳定的食物随着时间的推移。在这场斗争中取得了成功和失败，并且继续，对于世界上的人数而越来越多，而土地资源数量是数量的。这是从“来自贫世”（Blaxter和Robertson，1995）的第一章中，讲述了在1936年至1986年的五十年中发生的农业革命的故事。由于标题意味着，粮食短缺对生活在发达国家的人几乎是闻所未闻的。然而，我们的全球人口继续扩大，因此，在全球层面，饥饿和饥饿将与我们同在远远超过大流行。此外，这种情况将显着更糟糕的是，随着大流行（较短术语）的直接后果，在降低气候变化（长期）的降低土地资源（长期）。对于一些，'p

Editorial: Impact beyond data

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