In a small research community like fire engineering, impact factors in journals designed for much large communities in Medicine, Geography and Economics does not really describe the importance of the contributions to the state of the art. Alternative impact factors could be more indicative of the situation. For example the numbers of downloads of papers in the web could be one. I have just consulted the last statistics from Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA). It is a different story. See below another way of quantifying of our impact (in absolute terms and within the context of The University of Edinburgh).
ERA hosts 242 collections and 1,570 papers from the University of Edinburgh at large. It has registered 192,749 downloads mostly from USA, UK and China.
We are the most downloaded collection in the whole University. We have 13 authors in the top 50 most downloaded. We have 11 papers in the top 50 most downloaded.
Details attached.
--------ERA www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk ---- 16/04/2008
in TOP 50 COLLECTIONS
ERA collection downloads since 2006
#1 BRE Research Publications 14,634
#2 Institute of Geography 9,982
#3 Management School and Economics 8,764
#17 BRE PhD thesis collection 3,038
in TOP 50 AUTHORS
ERA name downloads since 2006
#1 Torero, Jose 10,745
#2 Usmani, Asif 6,292
#5 Welch, Stephen 4,264
#6 McLaughlin, Stephen 4,168
#7 Carvel, Ricky 3,975
#21 Rein, Guillermo 2,693
#23 Jowsey, Allan 2,591
#25 Fletcher, Ian 2,442
#27 Lane, Barbara 2,364
#28 Steinhaus, Thomas 2,358
#40 Lamont, Susan 1,636
#45 Flint, Graeme 1,448
#46 Fuentes, Andres 1,407
in TOP 50 PAPERS
ERA downloads since 2006 title
#12 1097 The behaviour of concrete structures in fire
#21 854 Study of a non-buoyant diffusion flame radiative
#25 820 Light Steel Framing: Improving the Integral Design
#26 803 Fire Size in Tunnels
#27 795 Large-scale pool fires
#28 794 Interactions between the Reaction Zone and Soot Field #36 721 How did the WTC towers collapse: a new theory
#39 634 Determination of Fire Induced Collapse Mechanisms of
#42 577 A Study of Fire Durability for a Road Tunnel: Comparing #45 562 Performance of concrete in fire: a review of the state
#47 549 Behavior of Structures in Fire and Real Design - A Case