Amphigouri: varnished nonsense

One of the guys in IT is big into fantasy leagues — particularly fantasy sports like football, baseball, etc. I’ve never really had much interest in those, not being a huge sports follower, but can certainly see the appeal for some. I even thought the Fantasy Congress league had some interesting potential (sounds like a neat way to teach kids more about politics — and lookee, they even have a FAQ about FC in Education). This latest variation, though… I’m not so sure. Fantasy.. Journals?? And no, that’s not the online diary-type journals they’re talking about, and not, as one commenter from that site speculated, the genre of more titillating magazines.

In a short paper [PDF] posted to his Web site, Bergstrom proposes creating the rules and Web infrastructure for a game of ”fantasy journals.”

“Players can select papers from across a field or even from across all of science for their own ‘fantasy journal,’ and then see how that journal performs according to the appropriate bibliometric measures.” (He suggests some function of the number of citations on Google Scholar after a period of time.)

(via Chronicle of Higher Ed Footnotes)

Uh. I just don’t know about that. Though I suppose it could be one way of teaching students about the various journals and publications they should be following within their discipline, but… huh.

“Dude, it’s so on!”